<p>Hi, all. Have any of your kids been victim to identity theft while enrolled in college? How did you handle it?</p>
<p>mmz, it depends on what happened, the level of vulnerability, and the student's and their family's long term risk tolerance. </p>
<p>An identity stolen today is worth about $25 to those who sell them; if the information sits for three to five years, it's worth about $250, because so much time has passed since the initial data breach that it's considered a far more valuable ID to fraudsters. </p>
<p>How can the student and parents handle it? If you live in one of the 25 states that allows credit freezes, you can freeze credit through all three CRAs, therefore preventing EVERYONE from applying for credit in the individual's name, but, as you can imagine that's somewhat problematic: sooner or later the victim will want to purchase a car, house, get a credit card, or even apply for a job where credit checks are part of the background check; the victim then will have to apply to get the credit freeze lifted, a process that can take two to three weeks - and - then reinstate the credit freeze once the authorized credit inquiry is concluded. </p>
<p>Other than that, there isn't anything much you can do, except, if bills show up that were not legitimately transacted by the debtor, dispute, file a police report, etc. </p>
<p>ID theft is hard to track and prosecute - most stolen identities are sold to second and third parties over the internet; at the moment, there is no law that requires ISPs to keep log files, but this is supposed to be a priority of the 110th congress. </p>
<p>But even if you can manage to identify the originating data breach and the person responsible (most people cannot), only 33 states currently have identity theft legislation on the books, and of those 33, there are something like 130 differences in those laws, so interstate (or is it intrastate?) prosecution and conviction is dicey. California is said to be the standard and has the best possible laws; if the OP relates to a real life event, hopefully it happened there. </p>
<p>Bottom line, obsessively protect all data elements leading to identity of social security, cedula or national id numbers, credit card and bank account numbers, etc.; be very, very careful about who gets what information. Don't even keep receipts together in one place if possible - some will have the first numbers of a credit card, others the final numbers, and between multiple receipts from different purchases it's possible for a thief to put together enough complete numbers to cause serious problems. It's also useful to remind especially young people who are just beginning to gain experience in contractual relationships, banking, use of credit, etc., that just because a form or application calls for specific data does NOT mean they have to supply it - it's entirely appropriate to ask hard questions - and to refuse to provide certain information - if the reasoning for needing it doesn't seem to be justified, or even if it just feels wrong.</p>