Life Lock

We don’t want to be part of the media’s hysteria mongering. We don’t want to sound like we’re employing scare tactics, or exaggerating the risks of identity theft. This is just an effort to bring you up to date data breaches, and tell you what Life Lock can do to make sure you don’t get burned by identity thieves.

First of all, take a look at the numbers: Since January 2002, 314,018,799 records have been lost in data breaches in the United States alone. The largest incidents so far have been:

• TJX—The corporation that owns TJ Maxx and other retail chains  94,000,000 records lost

• CardSystems—The corporation that processes credit transactions for Visa, MasterCard and American Express 40,000,000 records lost

• AOL—American Online, the internet browser service  30,000,000 records lost

• US Department of Veterans Affairs—The federal agency that manages veterans’ benefits and medical care  26,500,000 records lost

The message here is that it could happen to you. There are only 300 million people in the United States; in just these four data breaches, almost 200 million records were lost.

How Life Lock protects you from data breaches

Even enrolling in an identity theft protection program like Life Lock can’t guarantee that your personal or financial information will never be stolen. But Life Lock has just released two newly developed programs designed to detect identity theft before the first new accounts are even opened. Here’s how they work:

• eRecon™ — When someone steals millions of identities, they clearly intend to sell some of them to other thieves, and that piece of business is commonly conducted over the internet. So Life Lock created eRecon™ to constantly scan the internet for clients’ personal and financial information. With eRecon, Life Lock can tip you off in time to notify your creditors, the credit reporting companies and law enforcement before any damage is done to your credit.

• TrueAddress™ -- Why would an identity thief change your address? So they can receive your mail and search it for personal and financial information. Or, they may be getting ready to open new accounts in your name and don’t want you to get the statements; the longer they can prevent detection, the more damage they can do. TrueAddress™ monitors the millions of address change requests submitted to the US Postal Service every year. If your address is being changed, shouldn’t you know about it?

Data breaches and high gas prices…it’s all part of the price we pay for living in the twenty first century. It’s not worth getting hysterical about, and just like you can’t do anything about high gas prices, there’s nothing you can do to guarantee your information will never be stolen in a data breach. But Life Lock is your best protection if it ever happens.

This site is run by National Utility Services, LC., a contracted Affiliate of Life Lock, and is not owned nor operated by Life Lock, Inc.

©2002-2008 National Utility Services, LC