Identity theft is getting to be a really big issue these days. It’s in the news all the time, usually two or three times a week you’ll see the talking heads relating yet another story about identity theft or something that this or that congresscritter is proposing to do about it. Theres the seemingly endless stories about how to prevent identity theft, most of which are relating the same common sense advice that basically boils down to “be careful, think before you act”.
The thing is, there’s plenty of people who do their best to do all the right things and yet they still manage to get burned. Partly because there was something they could have done had they thought of it and had the time.
Now anyone can see that there’s a potential here, a problem in search of a solution. There’s been a lot of scams that claim to protect or repair the damage from identity theft, only to turn out to be an identity theft scam in themselves. One of the only legit services I’ve ever heard of is lifelock. That’s the one where the CEO, Todd Davis has his actual social security number posted on the website. I’ve seen commercials showing large trucks with his social security number printed on the side in six foot high numbers. He’s confident enough that lifelock has him covered that he openly publishes his SSN.
Basically what lifelock does is watch the credit reporting agencies and take actions to opt you out of credit card offers and a lot of junk snail-mail as well. Because this is their business, they can keep current on loads of people. This way something like checking your credit report for problems or updating your desire to not receive credit card offers doesn’t get forgotten because you lost track of when it needs to be updated.
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