Greg's Corner

Child safety kit scam returns to social media

By Greg Collier

The Indiana State Police have received complaints about a scam circulating on social media. The scam involves the advertising of child safety kits. If you’re not familiar with child safety kits, they are a way of gathering your child’s identifying information in case the unthinkable happens, and they go missing. These kits allow parents to quickly give investigators the information needed to help find their child. This includes a DNA sample such as strands of hair, recent photos, and fingerprints among other information. Many child safety organizations like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) partner with local law enforcement to provide these kits free to parents. You can even make your own kits at home, although you may want to have your children professionally fingerprinted by your local police.

Unfortunately, scammers will try to prey on a parent’s fears to ‘sell’ phony kits. These phony kits are really just attempts to steal your child’s personal information to use for identity theft. In Indiana, the State Police there are saying that after some parents clicked on the social media ad for one of these kits, they received phone calls from aggressive people who wanted to come to the parent’s home to install an app on the parent’s phone. When you’re trying to protect your child’s safety, the last thing you need is an aggressive stranger in your home seeking your child’s information. While the report doesn’t state what the app’s real purpose is, one can safely assume that the app either steals your child’s information when you enter it, or installs malware to your device.

The purpose of keeping your child’s information at hand is so that you can provide it to law enforcement quickly as possible if need be. Providing that information to a third party only delays giving the information to police.

In identity theft, there is a huge market for children’s information including their Social Security numbers. This way a scammer can use the information to build up credit years before the parents or the child would notice.