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I always thought this company had a great hook for their advertising but would never trust technology to the extent he says it could be trusted when he gave out his SS# during the ad.

ID Theft Security Company CEO Gets ID Stolen

After putting his social security number in ads as part of the marketing strategy of its company, the CEO of LifeLock, Todd Davis, has gotten his identity stolen. His ID information has been used to make a loan of $500 dollars.

A year ago, a Texas man used Davis’ Social Security number to get a $500 payday advance loan. Davis points out that the check cashing company made no attempt to verify the identity, which he believes would have stopped the theft cold, but says that’s not the important part of the story.

As soon as this has been made public, several lawsuits started against the company regarding the fact that it does not offer the protection it says it does, and that it charges for actions people can take for themselves for free.
Todd Davis replied to the accusations by saying that if his social security number has been seen by everybody looking at the company ads for the past two years, and only one attempt has succeeded in using it, then this is a proof that the service does work.

During the past two years, there have been allegedly 87 ID steeling attempts, twenty of them regarding people trying to use the information for obtaining driving licenses. Even though some of them were successful, LifeLock’s CEO considers that only the $500 loan case was a failure of the company’s system.

Mr. Davis states that people that thought that LifeLock offers 100 percent protection against ID theft, have gotten the wrong idea. According to him, there are no legal actions a company can do to fully prevent this sort of fraud, and that this claim can be found on LifeLock’s website also.

At this moment, Mr. Davis’s company offers ID fraud protection for 1 million members, and its service has failed for supposedly only 105 of them. LifeLock ‘s $1 Million Total Service Guarantee completely covered every one of them.

This is a good article about one of the reasons we are seeing the prices we are seeing:

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/flowchart/2008/3/10/why-gas-prices-rise-as-the-dollar-falls.html

This is a map of the country and the various gas prices…

http://michigangasprices.com/map_gas_prices.aspx?z=0&lat=37.984375&long=-96.312500&ft=A&tl=48

This is where the country should be focusing dollars at

http://www.mrsolar.com/

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan

http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/current.shtml

My one hope with the outrageously high fuel prices (yes Europe… I know how high it has been for you and for how long… I remember being shocked to death when I was in London and Koln back in 2000)  is that maybe, just maybe, this will push the general public into thinking more about alternate renewable energy forms. I don’t think we need to dump fossil fuels completely, but removing our absolute dependence on them would be great.