I keep hearing the CEO of LifeLock coming on the radio (and now, sometimes on TV), giving out his social security number and claiming that his company’s service, ‘LifeLock’, protects him from having to worry about identity theft.
Does LifeLock work? The answer is actually multi-faceted. One one hand, LifeLock does do things that protect your credit better than any other solution. On the other hand, it’s still not foolproof, and even CEO Todd Davis has been a victim of ID theft after giving his SSN out over the airwaves.
My biggest issue with the LifeLock service is that it charges a monthly fee to do something you can do yourself, for almost nothing. A monthly fee of $10 racks up to thousands of dollars over the course of anyone’s lifetime, which is how long we’d have to keep paying for it in order for it to be effective. The idea of paying someone protection money for the rest of my life doesn’t sit will with me.
So before anyone decides to run off and hire LifeLock for life, you should check out The Credit Padlock, which shows you how those services work and how you could do the same things for yourself, and keep the thousands of dollars in your pocket if you wanted to.
