smashjohn :
Life Lock actually provided protective services for individuals and families, but they were sued by Experian in 2008 and forced to stop the practice. Basically they acted as your proxy and enabled/disabled fraud protection on your credit accounts at a moment's notice, allowing users to open credit easily and then lock their credit when they were done. Now we have no proactive protection available, and companies like Equifax, Experian and Transunion can profit from the breach by charging us for monitoring and insurance. Wouldn't it make more sense to let me control when a line of credit is can be opened rather than have to deal with the aftermath of fraud every time? Yes, but it would be less profitable for these companies.
I had to pay for Lifelock last summer -- aside from the issue with the IRS (!?!) getting hacked & someone attempting to use our information to file a fake return with them, someone stole my wife's identity & opened a bunch of store credit cards in her name (happened to luck out & catch her because she opened a CostCo membership the same day that we were trying to, just 30 minutes before we applied, & she was still at the other store; their staff delayed her until the police could show up). So we paid for their middle plan, which includes monitoring your accounts for transactions as well as regular sweeps of known "Darkweb" sites for your personal information. It's expensive, to be sure...but a) we've already been burned once, & b) it's cheaper than Experian's protection (which only covers you with their bureau, not the other 3). And boy, do they catch them. We originally had the alert threshold set at $500, so
every month it asks us if we really meant to make our house payment. We just had a transaction they missed, though, because it was under that threshold, so now I've had to drop it to the $200 level (which now means the monthly car payment, as well as the semiannual car insurance payments, are going to trigger alerts). They're mildly irritating...but it gives us greater peace of mind.
Probably what they meant, though, was that they didn't want Lifelock handling the 'fraud alert' or 'credit freeze' options. Fraud alert flags on your account isn't necessarily a big thing because it's done for free (the 90-day alert gets shared with the other 2 credit bureaus, but the 7-year version has to be set with each one individually), & basically means that any financial institution (bank, credit union, loan company, auto dealership, etc.) has to contact you personally before opening any account. The credit freeze, though, is a major thing because a) as long as it's enabled
no company is allowed to see your credit score/report (unless you already have a pre-existing & active account with them, or the company is an authorized collection agency acting on that company's behalf), & b)
they charge a fee.
Fair warning on the fraud alerts: it makes a really big flag pop up with the Social Security Administration, & if you haven't already set up an online login for their site you'll have to go to a local office in person to get access to it.
Funny thing is, LifeLock sent me an alert back in May about a potential issue with 1 of my credit reports (possible name/address change, etc.). I called all 3 bureaus & went over the name/address information on them, but couldn't find anything that was out of place, & since the name/address in question actually belonged to my father (similar name, & they live close by) I didn't think anything more of it....now I'm wondering, since I had the alert in June, if it wasn't somehow tied into this hack.
TJ Hooker :
Even more since this data is so critical to every person and cannot be changes like a CC number.
Did you mean SSN? Because getting a different credit card number is easy.
No, I'm pretty sure he meant that, unlike changing CC numbers, it's really difficult to change the rest of the information. You have to go to a judge to legally change your name, changing your address means physically moving all of your stuff/buying a new place or finding a new place to rent/other financial issues, & I don't know if you can even change your SSN at all.
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