Is LifeLock Identity Theft Protection Services Legitimate?

Identity theft continues to rise annually. The Federal Trade Commission predicts that nearly 9,000,000 of the general public will get their identity stolen this year. You should be aware that ID theft can adopt numerous forms. The usual things that we often hear about is identity thieves getting fraudulent credit cards, or getting some sort of utility service in your name. Those who were not wise enough to sign up for some form of credit monitoring service never know about their identities being stolen until after all the damage is done. Someone obtains their credit report for some unrelated purpose, and then they see all fraud activity. Or a call is received from a collection service.

After that you can count on a significant amount of time, and possibly money, spent just trying to straighten out your identity, and credit record. Many people are turned down for certain jobs, can't get financing or a loan, and denied some apartment rentals all do to the incorrect negative info on their credit report. And although it is rare, they may even be arrested for crimes they did not commit.

It is because of these possibilities that more people are realizing that they have to get an identity theft protection service such as LifeLock. However, lately people have been hearing rumors that there may be some sort of LifeLock scam. Due to this, people are asking question and wondering about the services provided by the company.

We know that numerous people still remember the commercial campaign where the LifeLock president, Todd Davis, actually broadcast his real social security number and taunting people to try and steal it.

This was the accelerator that initiated all of the scam rumors. Everyone simply would not accept that anybody would take the risk of really using their real social security number in that manner, they speculated that it had to be some kind of catch.

If there was any question whether those advertisements worked, or not, they definitely worked big time. If there was some doubts about the popularity of the company name before, there was no question that everybody knew the name after those TV ads. Those advertisement created so much attention that it even got attention from the Federal Trade Commission who also wanted to know if that was his real social security number. So they started asking questions and looking into it further which became an official investigation. You can pretty much guess that an FTC investigation is only going to add to the LifeLock scam rumors, which it did.

The FTC was interested in more that just the TV ads with the social security number, they were concern with any company claiming to be number one when they are still fairly new. They did not like that their commercials was guaranteeing identity theft would not happen to you if you signed up for their service. And they really did not like that Mr Davis was giving out his real social security number on national TV and daring people to make an effort and use it. The Federal Trade Commission didn't like any of this and wanted the company to stop these particular ad campaigns, which they did.

The probe ended with a fine imposed on the company as a result of those advertisements, but it was determined to actually be his real social security number and this was not a scam. The thing that created all the misinformation regarding a LifeLock scam was all because of those commercials where Mr Davis was advertising his social security number. The numbers reported concerning that social security number advertised to millions was that 13 recorded attempts were made where people actually tried to use it. Out of that 13 there was one account which did actually get opened under the number. That was identified pretty quickly and then closed.

Some had said this is kind of an embarrassment, but Mr Davis says the service alerted him when the account was open which proves that it works. He says it is proof that there never was a scam. And he points out that, obviously, no other person is going to publicly advertise their social security number the way he did which means they are at far less risk.

He also points out that his company does more than just monitoring your credit report. They help protect personal information by using a combination of data surveillance techniques.