LifeLock Can It Really Protect Your Identity?
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LifeLock - I Wish I Knew About It Sooner!
To my horror, I ended up being a victim of identity theft. I originally had been subscribed to a credit monitoring service for many years and thought I was protected. Boy was I wrong.
Unbeknownst to me, it turns out that some guy had the same first and last name as me. He apparently just gotten out of jail and somehow got hold of my social security number. He quickly took advantage of my good credit and went to town. He made several large purchases at various establishments. He even had the gaul to purchase a new car! By the time I became aware of these charges they had totalled in the tens of thousands. I immediately called the credit agencies and wrote letters hoping this would clear up the matter. Apparently it doesn't work that way. Identity theft is almost impossible to fix yourself. That's when I wished I knew about LifeLock.
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I am a business owner and had my assistant initially try to fix the problem. She literally spent hundred of hours with little success. Some of the repercussions that resulted from this identity theft was my inability to purchase a home. I couldn't qualify for a loan despite my previous excellent credit record and copies of letters explaining my identity theft incident. We eventually had to put the house in my wife's maiden name to get around this issue. If only I knew about LifeLock sooner and had subscribed to their service. None of this would probably happen or if it did they would take immediate steps to solve this problem.
You can be sure I'll never be without my LifeLock service. It just not worth it to be without this piece of mind. I now can be confidant that my identity will never be stolen again!
The following are some statistics that I uncovered about identity theft that you should be aware of and why being protected is so very important:
- 8.4 million Americans fell victim to identity theft fraud in 2007.
- Identity theft has been the top consumer complaint to the FTC for the past five years in a row.
- The average victim spends an average of 600 hours recovering from Identity Theft.
- It is estimated that victims of Identity Theft lose an average of $5720 per Identity Theft incident and spend an average of $1400 repairing damage to their good name and credit record.
- In 26 percent of all cases, the victim knew who had misused their personal information.
- It is estimated that 9 percent of all victims reported a family member or relative as the person responsible for misusing their personal information.
- For 39 percent of victims, it took more than seven months to discover that their identity had been compromised.
- 29 percent of identity theft complaints were a part of Generation Y (ages 18-29).
- 25 percent of identity theft victim information was misused through credit card fraud.
- More than 30 million Americans have been victims of identity theft in the last five years.
- Lost or stolen laptops remain the top sources for breaches in corporate information, accounting for 45 percent of all the incidents studied.
- The monies recovered by individual victims of identity theft dropped from 80% in 2004 to 54% in 2006
- The 35-44 demographic age group averages highest dollar amount as victims of fraud ($9,435).
- Generation X (ages 25-34) has the highest victimization rate for identity fraud at 5.4 percent.
