ID-protection ads come back to bite pitchman
Todd Davis created a company which, he claimed, offered customers an iron-clad guarantee that their identity could not be stolen; to prove his point, ads for his fraud-prevention company, LifeLock, even offered his Social Security number next to his smiling mug; trouble is, a man in Texas did succeed in stealing Davis’s identity and used it to get a loan; now customers are suing
Gary Hart appeared to be having the lead in the crowded fields of candidates in the 1988 Democratic primaries, but persistent rumors about his marital infidelity dogged him. To dispel these rumors, he dared journalists to park outside his Georgetown home to see for themselves whether or not women other than his wife come visiting. A couple of journalists did hide in the bushes outside his home and photographed a young woman, who was not Hart’s wife, leave his house very early one morning. Within weeks Hart’s candidacy collapsed.
We walk down memory lane not only becasue we are now in the middle of the political season, but becasue a businessman named Todd Davis middle did not take the Hart lesson to heart. See, Todd Davis has dared criminals for two years to try stealing his identity: Ads for his fraud-prevention company, LifeLock, even offer his Social Security number next to his smiling mug. Now, Lifelock customers in Maryland, New Jersey, and West Virginia are suing Davis, claiming his service did not work as promised and he knew it would not, because the service had failed even him. Attorney David Paris said he found records of other people applying for or receiving driver’s licenses at least twenty times using Davis’s Social Security number, though some of the applications may have been rejected because data in them did not match what the Social Security Administration had on file. Davis acknowledged in an interview with AP that his stunt has led to at least eighty-seven instances in which people have tried to steal his identity, and one succeeded: a guy in Texas who duped an online payday loan operation last year into giving him $500 using Davis’ Social Security number. Paris said the fact Davis’s records were compromised at all supports the claim that Tempe, Arizona-based LifeLock does not provide the comprehensive protection its advertisements say it does. “It’s further evidence of the ineffectiveness of the services that LifeLock advertises,” said Paris, who is lead attorney on the three new lawsuits, the latest of which was filed this month.
Davis learned about the fraud in Texas when the payday-loan outfit called to collect on the loan, he said. He did not get an alert beforehand because the company did not go through one of the three major credit bureaus before approving the transaction. Davis said it is possible driver’s licenses have been issued
