14-Year-Old Central Florida Girl Is Victim Of Identity Theft

There's now proof that no one is safe from identity thieves. You worry about adults, but you never think about your kids. Now, a 14-year-old girl has discovered someone had ripped off her identity and it could cause years of trouble.

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Sign Up To Receive Our Daily News Of The Strange Email Identity theft is the fastest growing crime in the country and, while we usually think of the victims as being adults, here in Central Florida, it has happened to a child, too.

Kimberly Burdette wanted to open a savings account for her 14-year-old daughter. So she came to Washington Mutual in Winter Springs. That's when she found out, someone already had a bank account using her daughter's social security number.

Briana Burdette is not even old enough to have a credit card, but that didn't stop a thief from using her social security number to get one. She might not have known someone was stealing her identity had her mom not been to the bank. That's when she was told there was already a business account in the system under her daughter's social security number.

"When he put the numbers in, up popped someone else's name," explains Kimberly.

The bank said it could be a mistake, but Kimberly checked to see if there was an existing credit report. Sure enough, there was. Now she's convinced an identity thief somehow got Briana's social security number.

"They're using kids now. How long would it have been before someone ran her credit?" wonders identity theft expert Wayne Ivey.

That's exactly what the criminal wants, according to Ivey. That's why the elderly are targeted so often, too, because they don't use credit cards often.

"They're not going out every day, creating credit reports, so the perpetrator can operate longer undetected," explains Ivey.

To try to clear her daughter's name, Kimberly had to get a letter from the Social Security office verifying her daughter's number. She has to send a birth certificate now to the credit bureau to have the information removed and stop the criminal. And now the bank is investigating, but Briana still worries about college.

"My mom told me, sometimes they check your credit. They'll look and they might say, 'Oh, we don't want her,' ya know," comments Briana.

That's possible. "This is something that can hinder her for a period of years, until she's able to straighten it out," says Ivey.

The bank has not yet frozen the account under Briana's social security number, because fraud investigators are hoping to catch the thief in the act.