Lifelock Problems Haven’t Effected Consumer Confidence In Lifelock
Recently we witnessed several Lifelock problems arise but truth be known the company didn’t seem to be effected and continued to grow, reaching a million customers in the process. Lifelock continues to be the the number 1 choice in identity theft protection in spite of a few new pretenders hovering in the shadows to take over should the Lifelock problems have proved to be critical.
In May we had the news of several clients taking class action lawsuits against Lifelock over claims the Lifelock advertising campaign was misleading.
The claim was based on the fact that Todd Davis gives out his social security number in LifeLock advertisements to prove how confident he is in the protection provided by Lifelock. It appears they felt, or at least their lawyer felt that this is misleading because actually someone took out a cash loan for $500 using the SSN of Todd Davis.
Obviously this made the national news, it’s a great story but then as the story ran it was shown that actually Lifelock had worked for Davis. The thief who took out the fraudulant loan was caught and more importantly, Davis credit file 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 hadn’t even cancelled their Lifelock subscription. 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 reporting that the service provided by Lifelock could be done by a person 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 issuing credit, loans etc. Basically it means the person has concern their identity has been compromised so please double check before opening offering credit or giving out a loan. 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 tell us you can add this fraud alert yourself so Lifelock are taking monthly fees 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 just 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 a person’s credit file. It slows down the the business of issuing credit and creates work for the credit bureaus. It’s because of this that a fraud alert only lasts for a period of 3 months. 4 times a year you have to go through the whole process of applying for it again.
Lifelock do all this for their clients automatically and should something go wrong and an identity gets stolen, they guarantee to make good up to the tune of a nice $1 million and it’s this that their clients are more than happy to pay the ten buck fee for.
One other reason Lifelock are not the favorite company of Experian is because Lifelock remove their clients names from all the mailing lists. The theory being if you aren’t receiving credit card offers through the mail, they can’t be stolen and accepted in your name.
It sounds a 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 huge 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 people you know for a fact already have several cards and an income of $60K 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 most new highly successful companies, deeper motives are usually found when stories start appearing in the news and the Lifelock problems are no different.
If you were considering teaming up with Lifelock, make your decision based solely on the service they offer, not on the Lifelock problems that you may have read about back in the Summer.
Yes you can do what Lifelock does yourself. You may also be capable of servicing your car yourself if you wanted to and some folk do. Others though prefer the security 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 as back up.
You can check out Lifelock yourself by clicking here.
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