Toddler Has Identity Stolen Twice - Yahoo! News
Another reason Terry has not gotten a response is that technically she and her daughter are not victims of fraud because there was no financial loss, Niblick said.
In this case, someone had used the daughters Social Security number and her name to get a phone. And it is true that unless the phone company comes after the toddler, they can't say the fraud cost them X amount of dollars.
However, the unpaid charges WILL show up on a credit report. And I believe a case could be made that by damaging your credit, they have damaged you financially.
Woogie, you're in Indiana, do they not have any Identity theft laws on the books? Want to ping your state legislator about that?
Posted by danisaacs at July 19, 2005 10:58 AM | TrackBackThis isn't news or anything new. I used to work for GTE and this happened every single day. Mom would run up a $300 bill, get TDO'd, then call in the next day acting as their daughter and we wouldn't get a hit on their credit and have to put service in. Eventually things changed where we required them to show ID, that usually stopped the majority of problems. Easiest way to get around it was to order absolutely everything possible so the rep would make a ton of cash on the call and "forget" to check for their SS# in the database.
But in this case, it will appear in the credit report, but it's pretty easy to remove since all it will take will be a birth certificate and a note from Social Insecurity stating how old the person is. Once that's done, it's easy to get it removed...
The story is right, though. They can't hold the daughter accountable for the bill since she was not of age. Since this has been proven, they will figure out who is responsible for the bill and will move the account to that person's name pretty quickly.
Posted by: Brian on July 19, 2005 11:40 AM