Cybercriminals like them young – really young – when it comes to identity theft targets.

That’s the warning issued by increasing numbers of experts who insist there has been a spike in the number of minors who have had their identities stolen.

In the United States, matters are so bad that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission just published a pamphlet entitled, “Back to school, back to protecting your child’s information.”  Two takeaways: neither educational institutions nor kids themselves are very good at protecting student identities.

Whoever would want a kid’s identity – especially since he/she probably has no assets and may have no credit history? Michael Bruemmer, a vice president at credit reporting agency Experian explained why children are prime targets: “They have virgin identities,” he said. “They may have no money but a virgin identity is very easy to use.”

A virgin identity won’t ring alarm bells anywhere.  Then, too, children do not pull credit reports on themselves every year – standard advice in some countries for adults – so frauds can go on for some time before anybody is the wiser.

Apparently, lots of child identity theft now happens. Lysa Myers, a researcher at security company Eset, said: “figures from a variety of surveys would seem to indicate that child’s ID theft is a very prevalent and yet very underreported occurrence.”

New York executive Mario Almonte said that when his then 16 year-old son filed a federal tax return, he received a notification from the IRS that his identity may have been compromised.  The IRS offered Almonte and his son no details on how the boy’s identity may have been used – a solid guess is that it was used to file a false tax refund claim, often in the thousands of dollars.  And the agency put the family through a gauntlet of questions before letting the boy reclaim his identity. Finally it worked out – he was recognized for who he is – but, said Almonte, the whole experience is unsettling.

In the United States, a child gets a Social Security Number – kind of a national ID – soon after birth. Explained identity theft expert Robert Siciliano: “Within days of your child’s birth, you typically sign documentation prior to being released from the hospital, and a Social Security number is issued within a few weeks. That number is promptly distributed to many entities: the hospital, your doctors’ offices, your insurance company, the IRS.”

Many other countries have similar systems.

Where do criminals harvest the Social Security Numbers they steal? Some of the big health insurer breaches in the US are believed to have involved Social Security numbers, including many for dependent children.  In breaches, the IRS itself also has apparently given criminals large volumes of information on taxpayers, often involving dependents. Then, too, schools are notoriously porous – few pre-university institutions have invested in meaningful information security.

Kids also unwittingly set the stage for their own undoing with vivid and lengthy postings on social media – information that lets a cyber-criminal easily build a dossier on victims that includes everything from favorite primary school teacher to first boy/girlfriend.  Pre-Internet that information was hard to gather, now it is bountiful.

It also is simple to persuade a student to directly part with his/her personal info. For instance: Many legitimate credit card issuers canvas college orientation weeks, urging students to fill out applications. But identity theft experts say that increasingly crooks are in that mix and their goal simply is to gather as much personal information as possible. That worry is why Experian cautions students never to fill out applications in those circumstances but always to go directly to the institution’s website.

James Quin, an executive with think tank CDM Media, explained how child identity theft sets up tragedy: “A seven year old child today will not likely realize their credit has been destroyed by fraudulent activity until it comes time for them to use it in about 10 years for things like student loan applications.”

Siciliano amplified the worries: “There have been far too many instances of parents receiving a call from a bill collector informing you that your two-year-old bought a Mercedes and defaulted on a loan. Or perhaps law enforcement may come knocking on your door to inquire about crimes committed by your newborn child. So besides damaged credit, you child could have income tax liability or a criminal record as the result of identity theft.”

Know this: it often is hard to undo the damages done by identity theft.  Best advice is to avoid it and that means parents need to have yet another conversation with their children about do’s and don’t’s where here the message is: don’t give away your identity, keep it private, protect it.  That’s a conversation that rarely happens. But today’s message is: it’s now a must.