Legal Hub

A few months a go we saw several Lifelock problems make the news but truth be known the company were never effected and continued to grow, reaching a million customers in the process. Lifelock is still the the number 1 choice in identity theft prevention in spite of one or two new pretenders skulking in the shadows to step in should the Lifelock problems have proved to be deadly.

Back in May we had the news of several customers taking class action lawsuits against Lifelock because they claimed their advertising campaign was misleading.

The claim was based on the fact that Todd Davis gives out his social security number in Life Lock advertisements to prove how confident he is in the protection provided by Lifelock. It seems they felt, or at least their lawyer felt that this was misleading because actually someone took out a cash loan for $500 using the social security number of Todd Davis.

This made the news and why wouldn’t it, it’s a good story but then as the story ran it was shown that actually Lifelock had worked for Davis. The person who took out the loan was caught and more importantly, the Todd Davis credit report remained clean.

We also found out that none of the clients who were seeking the class action had actually suffered a case of identity theft and had not even cancelled their Lifelock membership. The story died as quickly as it appeared.

The next Lifelock problems seemed to be a little more serious. Experian, one of the big 3 credit bureaus were claiming that the service provided by Lifelock could be done by anyone without the need of a monthly charge.

Lifelock, acting on a on behalf of their clients, place a fraud alert on their credit file which means extra care should be taken when offering credit, loans etc. Basically it means the person has concern their identity could have been compromised so please act with caution before opening a line of credit. By the way, the person who took out the $500 payday loan in Davis name was able to because the company handling the loan admitted to ignoring the fraud alert.

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

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

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

Lifelock manage this for their clients each quarter and should they forget and an identity gets stolen, they have a guarantee that kicks in to the tune of a nice $1 million and it’s this their clients are more than happy to pay the ten buck fee for.

Another reason Experian have been trying to cause Lifelock problems is because Lifelock remove their customers names from 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 Experian and the other 2 credit bureaus as these lists are extremely targeted and thereforeextremely valuable. Just consider sending out your credit card or loan offer to homes you know for a fact already have several cards and an income of $90K a year instead of merely posting to the masses and then having to go through all the applications to sieve out the good from the bad?

As with many new highly successful companies, ulterior 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 purely on the service they offer, not on the Lifelock problems that you may have read about a few months back.

Yes you can do what Lifelock does for you yourself. You may also be capable of servicing your car yourself if you wanted to and some people do. Others though like the security that comes with knowing a professional has done it for them and should they make a mess of it, there is a full guarantee as back up.