LiveWire

A post by Maynard

How do you boys and girls protect yourselves from identity theft? It would certainly be inconvenient to be notified that “you” had borrowed a vast chunk of money over the past year, and now “you” were expected to pay it back or face the consequences. You wouldn’t be held liable under the circumstances, but you’d be stuck with cleaning up a big mess. It’s worth taking steps to prevent that scenario.

A few years ago I subscribed, for about $50 a year, to a monitoring service to notify me of any credit inquiries made against my name. The various data companies offer various plans and options, often entangled with credit scores or other fluff that doesn’t seem vital to me. For example (and this is not a recommendation; merely a pointer to an example), this is the cheapest Equifax plan.

Recently there’s been a flurry of advertising by a new company named LifeLock. For $10 a month (and there are promotional discounts to be found), they will maintain a fraud alert on your name, thus requiring that any new credit by explicitly approved by a confirmed communication. This, they claim, blocks the crime before it happens, rather than sounding the alarm after damage is done.

Another company offering a similar program is Debix.

My understanding is that it’s possible for you to put the fraud watch on your name yourself. I’m not sure how much trouble this is, versus paying LifeLock.

A number of celebrities, including maybe-presidential-candidate Fred Thompson, have participated in LifeLock advertising. Here’s an interesting article that reveals some details of the history of LifeLock. Apparently the founder has a checkered past. (Note that the “Maynard” referred to herein is not me!)

LifeLock was co-founded in 2005 by Robert J. Maynard Jr., whom the Federal Trade Commission accused in 1996 of deceiving consumers with advertisements that suggested his credit-repair company could remove records of bankruptcies and delinquent payments.

The FTC also alleged that Maynard and another executive at National Credit Foundation Inc. collected checking-account data from its customers for “verification” when the real purpose was to make unauthorized withdrawals from those accounts.

Maynard settled both allegations with the FTC in 1997 without admitting wrongdoing but agreed to be barred from “advertising, promoting, offering for sale, selling, performing or distributing any product or service relating to credit-improvement services.”

And that’s not all…

Maynard has told reporters that he was inspired to start LifeLock after being wrongly jailed in 2003 for an unpaid secured casino debt known as a marker, which, under Nevada law, is treated as a bad check, a criminal offense.

Maynard said his identity had been stolen and the fraud cost him thousands of dollars. But as first reported May 31 in Phoenix New Times, that media-friendly story may be misleading.

After his arrest, Maynard never told authorities he wasn’t responsible for the $16,080 debt racked up at the Mirage in Las Vegas. The funds were wired on his behalf to cover the debt, Maynard was released and the charges were dropped.

Maynard said Friday that he didn’t tell Vegas authorities about his identity theft because a day after his arrest, his wife filed for sole custody of their children and the only way he could appear in court was to get out of jail quickly by paying the debt.

Clark County, Nev., Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Bernie Zadrowski, however, said in an interview this week that “we could show beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was the one who committed the crime.”

There’s apparently a complicated story behind all this, and it doesn’t look pleasant.