Last Summer we witnessed several Lifelock problems arise, but truth be known LifeLock never broke stride and continued to grow, reaching a million customers in the process. LifeLock is still the leading ID theft protection service in spite of several new identity theft companies waiting in the shadows to take over should the LifeLock problems have proved to be deadly.

In May we had the news of a few clients taking legal action 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 Life Lock advertisements to show how confident he is in the protection provided by LifeLock. It appears they felt, or at least their lawyer felt, that this was misleading because actually a criminal managed to take out a cash loan for $500 using the social security number of Todd Davis.

Obviously this made the national news, it’s a good story but then as the story ran it came to light that actually LifeLock had worked for Davis. The person who took out the fraudulent loan was caught and more just as importantly, Davis credit report remained perfect.

We also learned that none of the customers who were seeking the class action had actually suffered a case of identity theft and hadn’t even canceled their LifeLock subscription. The words “ambulances” and “chasers” sprung to mind and the story died a quick and relatively painless death.

The next LifeLock problems to appear seemed a little more serious. Experian, one of the major credit bureaus, was telling anyone who would listen that the service provided by LifeLock could be done by a person without the need of a monthly subscription.

LifeLock, acting for their customers, place a fraud alert on credit report, to provide identity theft fraud protection, which means extra care should be taken when agreeing to credit, loans etc. Basically it means the person has concern their identity may have been compromised so please double check 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 loan company admitted to ignoring the fraud alert.

Experian claims you can add this fraud alert yourself, so LifeLock is taking monthly subscriptions under false pretenses. At first glance this looked like a serious LifeLock problem, and once more the press jumped in feet first.

A little bit of 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. It slows 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. 4 times a year you have to go through the whole process of applying for it again.

LifeLock does all this for their customers each quarter, and should something go wrong and an identity gets misused, they guarantee to make good up to the tune of a nice $1 million and it’s because of this their customers are happy to pay a small monthly fee.

Another reason Experian have been trying to cause LifeLock problems is because the LifeLock protect identity solutions removes their customers names from mail 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.

Sounds reasonable 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 a huge business for the Experian and the other 2 credit bureaus, as these lists are extremely targeted and therefore extremely valuable. Just consider sending out your credit card or loan offer to households you already know have several cards and an income of $100K a year instead of just posting to the masses and then having to go through all the applications to weed out the good from the bad?

As with many new highly successful companies, ulterior motives are usually found when stories start breaking in the news and the LifeLock problems regarding its identity theft protection services are no different.

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

Yes, you can do what Lifelock does for you with their ID protection plan. 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 the knowledge that a professional has done it for them and should the person doing the job mess up, there is a full guarantee on offer as a back up.