Children targeted in surging numbers

Pristine credit is top temptation

Shelbi Ramey has about $13,000 in credit card debt and a poor credit report score of 511, She's also in second grade.

The 7-year-old Zephyrhills, Fla., resident is a victim of identity theft, robbed of good credit and accosted by debt collectors before she could go to a PG-13 movie by herself, let alone get a driver's license.

Her mother, Shannon Godfrey, is accused of stealing her daughter's identity to get a new credit card after her own credit was ruined. Godfrey denies having anything to do with the identity theft, but in a report filed with the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, the detective on the case wrote that Godfrey had admitted to the theft and that she did not know it was illegal at the time.

Shelbi's case is rare, but far from isolated. The number of identity theft complaints to the Federal Trade Commission involving minors surged 58 percent between 2003 and 2004 to about 4 percent of total identity theft complaints, whereas the overall number of complaints increased 19 percent to 234,263. In Massachusetts, about 3 percent of the 3,776 identity theft complaints to the FTC regarded victims under the age of 18.

But according to Linda Foley of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a San Diego nonprofit that helps victims of identity theft, the problem is underreported and much more serious. Victimized minors make up about a quarter of the calls from victims that come into the center, said Foley, who is the center's coexecutive director and cofounder.

The reason? Minors don't discover that their credit has been misused until the first time they try to open a credit line themselves, usually when they are in their late teens. Much of the time, the perpetrator ends up being a family member, who turned to the child's pristine credit history after ruining his or her own.

''Child identity theft is usually one of the easiest crimes to commit," said Robert Siciliano, chief executive of IDTheftSecurity.com, a Boston company that provides training and consulting to corporations to help prevent them from becoming victims of identity theft. ''How often does a 10-year-old check their credit?"

But perpetrators are not always known to the victim.

Detective Steven Baldassare of the Danvers Police Department still laughs in disbelief when he recounts the story of a victim he encountered. Soon after he became a detective two years ago, he was approached by a 15-year-old girl and her mother. The 15-year-old had just applied for her first cellphone but was rejected for having bad credit.

According to her credit report, she had a mortgage on a house in New York and owed money to two car dealerships for leases, Baldassare said.

Foley, of the Identity Theft Resource Center, said that parents most often turn to their children's Social Security numbers after ruining their own credit history and don't intend to ruin their children's credit as well.

Maxine Sweet, vice president of public education for credit-reporting agency Experian, said credit reporting agencies, which check people's finances when they apply for new lines of credit, are unable to cross-reference birth dates listed on credit applications with government databases to verify someone's age.

Revere resident Randy Waldron Jr., a 24-year-old flight attendant, didn't know that his estranged father, Randy Waldron, had stolen his Social Security number until years later. The son said he discovered the theft when he was 17 and applied for his first credit card with Capital One, but was rejected because he already had an outstanding balance with the company of $3,000.

In total, Waldron said that his father accumulated almost $2 million in debt and civil judgments using his name and Social Security number. What's more, Waldron's father was actually prosecuted under his name and number for assault and battery of a police officer and a former wife, Waldron said.

Waldron estimates he has spent thousands of hours working with officials with both states and credit card companies to get the charges and debts removed, but he said he still often runs into trouble when applying for credit.

A man who lives at the address listed on an affidavit in which Randy Waldron admitted to misusing his son's Social Security number and who said that his name is Randy Waldron denied that he is the same Randy Waldron in the case when reached by phone.

Waldron did get a chance to speak to his father two years ago, when he fled to his home country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines to avoid prosecution.

''He told me that he didn't want to return because he was afraid I would throw him in jail," Waldron said.

But identity theft, especially when the perpetrators live in other states, is hard to prosecute.

Shelbi's father Jeffrey Ramey, who was divorced shortly before his former wife allegedly began to use their daughter's Social Security number, said Shelbi's credit still isn't clear, and local law enforcement has had difficulty putting together a case to prosecute Godfrey.

He still remembers the difficulty with which he had to explain to his daughter that her mother might have taken her Social Security number and used it to make fraudulent purchases. He says Shelbi still can't quite understand why credit card companies thought she was 25 years old and had made reservations for a honeymoon in the Poconos.

''She overheard me talking on the phone and asked what a Social Security number was," he said. ''I said, 'It's a special number only for you, and mommy took it from you.' "

Joe Light can be reached at jlight@globe.com.