May 2, 2007

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  NEWS: "Lifelock" Claims ID Theft Protection

  Todd Davis wants to help protect your identity, and thinks that he's found a foolproof way. Just hand over ten dollars a month to his company, Lifelock, and sit back, worry free over the state of your identity. Or so the promise goes. Dais runs Lifelock out of Largo, Florida, where local police don't think so much of the validity of his promises. Detective Mitch Reed from the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, who deals with numerous reports of identity theft on a daily basis, says that he has a good idea of the real extent to which the crime is a major problem. And Reed isn't convinced that anyone is truly able to guarantee your security for a monthly charge.
  
  What Lifelock does, in a nutshell, is place fraud alerts on all your bank and credit/debit card accounts with the three major credit reporting bureaus. With that protection in place, no-one can run your credit for any reason without you first receiving a phone call to notify you. Fraud alerts are meant to protect consumers from random solicitation (like pre-approved credit card offers by mail) and deliberate theft action both. Reed is so confident in the strength of these alerts that he was willing to publish his social security number on the Internet (he did!), and offer what seems like a watertight guarantee:
  
  "If anything happens for any reason while you're our client we're going to fix the problem...cover all losses, and all expenses up to 1 million dollars. Whatever has occurred...if you get thrown in jail because someone committed a crime we're going to bail you out of jail...we're going to hire you a lawyer...and cover all of those expenses to get your life back to where it was," says Davis. Of Lifelock's quarter-million subscribers, he's only had to invoke the guarantee three times, he states.
  
  But Reed remains unconvinced. He says that the majority of people will become victims to some extent of identity theft in the next five years, with or without precautions like Lifelock.
  
  
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