Only if you never turn on your radio or TV will you not have heard of the identity theft protection company, Life Lock. Life Lock does not claim to do much that you could not do for yourself. They even tell you that for free you can:
Set and maintain fraud alerts with the major credit bureaus. Request your name be removed from pre-approved credit card mailing lists. Request your name be removed from junk mail lists. Order annual free credit reports from the three major credit bureaus. Do all of this repeatedly in a timely fashion.
If you are a busy person, a lazy person, or just a plain average person, you know you will not do all of that, even with identity theft protection as the goal.
Life Lock will not only do all of that, but if you have an identity theft problem, they will spend up to $1 million (you read that right) in your lifetime to reimburse you for any losses and to hire whomever it takes to solve the problem. (Please note that you need to be a client before the victimization occurs in order to receive these services; pre-existing victimization is not covered.)
We ran across some cases on the Internet that we were not sure would fall into the classification of identity theft protection that Life Lock would handle. We contacted Life Lock and were impressed with the promptness of their response and their willingness to answer our questions.
Mike Prusinski, Vice-President of Communications at Life Lock, stated that they realize that identity theft isn't completely unstoppable. Family members can easily take advantage of other family members because they know the key information. Some organizations don't work with the credit bureaus or they refuse to verify identification. However, he assured us that even in these kinds of cases, the million-dollar service guarantee holds. It's not like insurance, picking and choosing which identity-theft cases to take up. "We don't care how someone was able to use a client's information; if a client was victimized, we (Life Lock) will reimburse all losses immediately, then spend our time and money to fix all problems. If we [need] to hire investigators, we hire them. If we need to hire lawyers, we hire them."
Prusinski added, "If a client ever becomes a victim, we would do all the heavy lifting and spend whatever money we had to (up to $1 million) to make it right. As we have been told many times, it's the frustration and sense of helplessness that [identity-theft] victims feel is the worst."
Those are the things you can't do free for yourself.