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May 2, 2007
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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