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Tuesday, October 04, 2011

Stealing Elderly Parents' Identities A Hidden, Common Crime


Child ID theft is a scourge of the digital age -- a terrible crime that often sees parents ruining their own kids’ futures by taking out mortgages, car loans and other financial obligations in their names. But a new study shows that another kind of family-based ID theft, which rarely grabs headlines, might be much more prevalent: Stealing the identities of elderly parents.

Security firm ID Analytics looked at billions of credit applications and other related data recently to find people using the same Social Security number and last name, but different first names, with an eye toward determining the prevalence of child ID theft. The firm then narrowed the list by searching for pairs sharing SSNs who were 18 to 25 years apart in age, indicating a jump in generations.

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