Credit Parent, Inc. has announced the public release of the first credit freeze document preparation service enabling parents to quickly and easily freeze the credit reports of their children. The release marks the first offering of its kind on the market.
“There is widespread consensus among financial and security experts that freezing the credit reports is the single most effective approach to addressing child identity theft,” said co-founder and CEO, Nick Haschka. “This has become an adoption problem driven by lack of public awareness and lack of tools for consumers. Freezing a child’s credit without Credit Parent is a bit like preparing your taxes without TurboTax or H&R Block. You can do it. It’s actually free. But, there are a lot of steps and administrative tasks involved, and it’s hard to know if you are even doing it right. Credit Parent has solved this with technology that makes the process faster, easier, and unmistakably clear to the consumer.”
Media outlets and government organizations including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the US Federal Trade Commission, and the California Attorney General’s Office have all published articles or statements warning consumers about the grave threat posed to young children and their parents by identity thieves. Sophisticated identity thieves have been able to use the unblemished financial identities of minors as young as a few months old to extract significant amounts of money over many years from unsuspecting lenders, without fear that the victim will notice and intervene. The victim’s parents are left with a bureaucratic mess that can take years to unravel.
Credit Parent’s service allows parents to submit the required information through a secure web-based form that works on mobile, tablet, and a desktop computer. Parents can easily generate electronic versions of the required documents from physical copies using their device’s camera interface, or they can attach electronic files in a wide variety of formats. Once the parent completes the application, which generally takes anywhere from 3-15 minutes, Credit Parent takes over and finishes the process by reviewing the information for accuracy and completeness, producing all the required applications, and transmitting them to Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion to complete the freeze. Most importantly, Credit Parent then deletes all the consumer data to ensure no electronic documents or sensitive data are stored and confirms deletion of records with the parent. Parents then receive freeze confirmations and unfreeze PIN codes directly from the credit bureaus within 3 weeks.
“Our child credit freeze service is a radical improvement over the status quo process, and we believe it can meaningfully increase the rate at which parents complete this important task,” said Haschka. “There’s still a lot of consumer awareness to raise, but we think Credit Parent can really stem the tide of child identity theft.”
The service created by Credit Parent was enabled by the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act of 2018. The bipartisan legislation forced the credit reporting bureaus to provide a credit freeze pathway for all consumers.
Concurrent with the product release, Credit Parent, Inc. has also announced the completion of its seed financing, which will capitalize the company for additional product development and allow it to scale up its sales and marketing efforts.
More information about Credit Parent’s child credit freeze service can be found at https://creditparent.com.
