Lifelock Problems Aren’t As They First Appear

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Sunday, November 16th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed

Over the Summer we had several Lifelock problems surface but in truth Lifelock didn’t seem to be effected and continued to grow, now having over a million customers. Lifelock is still the leader in identity theft protection in spite of one or two new pretenders hoping in the shadows to take over should the Lifelock problems have been lethal.

Back in May we had the story of several clients taking legal action against Lifelock because they claimed the Lifelock advertising campaign was misleading.

The claim hinged on the fact that Todd Davis gives out his social security number in Life Lock advertisements to show how confident he is in the identity theft prevention provided by Lifelock. It seems they felt, or at least their lawyer felt that this is misleading because actually some guy took out a payday loan for $500 using the SSN of Todd Davis.

This obviously made the news, it’s a good story but then as the story ran it was shown that actually Lifelock had worked for Davis. The thief who took out the loan was caught and more importantly, the CEO’s credit file remained clean.

We also discovered that none of the customers who were attempting the lawsuit had actually suffered a case of identity theft and hadn’t even cancelled their Lifelock subscription. The story quickly got buried once it became clear the person behind it was a opportunist lawyer who’d found a new fat cow to chase.

The next Lifelock problems appeared to be a little more serious. Experian, one of the major credit bureaus were reporting that the service provided by Lifelock could be done by a person without the need of a monthly subscription.

Lifelock, acting on a customers behalf, place a fraud alert on their credit file which means extra care should be taken when agreeing loans, credit agreements etc. Basically it means the person is concerned their identity may have been compromised so please double check before opening offering credit. Incidentally, the person who took out the $500 payday loan in Davis name was able to because the loan company admitted to ignoring the fraud alert.

Experian tell us you can place a fraud alert yourself so Lifelock are taking monthly subscriptions under false pretences. This looked like serious Lifelock problems and again the press jumped in to what seemed a good story.

A little digging by a few journalists who prefer to report news rather than a good story again showed that what appeared to be Lifelock problems, actually had ulterior motives.

It seems Experian do not like fraud alerts on credit files. It slows down the the business of issuing credit and causes extra work for them. It’s for this reason that a fraud alert only lasts 3 months. You then have to go through the whole process of applying for it again.

Lifelock do all this for their clients every 3 months and should they forget and an identity gets misused, they guarantee to make good up to the tune of a nice $1 million and it’s this that their customers are happy to pay a $10 fee for.

One other reason Lifelock are not the favorite company of Experian is because Lifelock remove their clients names from all the financial mailing lists. The theory being if you aren’t receiving credit card offers through the post, they can’t be stolen and accepted in your name without your knowledge.

This sounds a really good idea right? Well guess who sells the credit card companies the names of affluent middle class Americans who the credit card companies want to target? This is big business for the credit bureaus as these lists are extremely targeted and therefore worth a lot of money. Imagine sending out your credit card or loan offer to homes you already know have several cards and an income of $90K a year instead of just posting to the masses and hoping for the best?

As with most new highly successful companies, deeper motives can usually be found when stories start breaking in the news and the Lifelock problems are no different.

If you were thinking about teaming up with Lifelock, make your decision based solely on the service offered, not on the Lifelock problems that you may have heard about back in the Summer.

Yes you can do what Lifelock does for you yourself. You could probably also service your car yourself if you so wanted and some people do. Others though like the peace of mind that comes with the knowledge that a professional has done it for them and should the person doing the job make a mess of it, there is a full guarantee on offer as a back up.

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