MyTruston -- where you can see if someone is stealing your identity for free!

You won't get a million dollar guarantee and Tom Fragala's social security number if you decide to use myTruston identity theft prevention/recovery services. You also aren't going to get the paid endorsements for his product by Fred Thompson, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or Howard Stern.

Tom, who is the CEO/Founder of MyTruston doesn't believe in buying endorsements, paying bloggers, or doing massive advertising campaigns to promote his service.

He trusts that once a prudent consumer looks at his product and the value it provides, the service sells itself.

Tom was an identity theft victim himself and has spent thousands of hours advocating for other victims. Many of the basic principles behind myTruston were based on both of these personal experiences.

What you get with myTruston is a "piece of mind" that if you have to protect yourself from identity theft -- your information isn't being exposed in another place -- where it might be compromised.

Preventing identity theft using myTruston is and always has been free, you only pay for the recovery services, if and when you need them.

Most identity theft services require that you provide them with all of your personal information, and in some instances, even your power of attorney.

With myTruston you can protect your identity, and if need be, recover from identity theft without giving up your information to a third-party.

With call centers being outsourced -- the possibility of insider theft, and hacking techniques that seem to routinely defeat current security technology -- this might be something to think about when protecting your identity and financial well-being.

All identity theft services bundle free services that theoretically could be done for free. It's a low overhead and immensely profitable business. The trick to it is making sure you do everything properly, and this is where a third-party service can add value.

The unique twist with Truston is that it's free to prevent identity theft and you only pay to recover from it. In other words, you don't pay for something that might never happen to you, which seems to be a common denominator with a lot of the services out there.

Many of the services out there charge $10.00 and up a month to protect you, which is free at myTruston. Many of them (also) do not cover you if you were compromised before you paid for their services (read the fine-print).

What Truston provides is an easy do-it-yourself (DIY) platform that makes it easy for the average person to ensure they are not being compromised, and take effective action if they have been.

Truston recently announced they were upgrading their service and lowering the cost of their paid (recovery) service. The paid portion of the service only needs to be used as long as the customer feels it is necessary.

Here is a portion of the announcement from their blog:

This week we released a new version of our award-winning myTruston service. The new features are FREE to current members for a 45–day free trial period. These four new prevention and privacy services are:

1. Credit bureau fraud alerts
2. Chexsystems fraud alerts
3. Stop pre-approved credit offers
4. Stop telemarketing calls

We updated our product names: we now have myTruston Free and myTruston Plus. myTruston Free has the same features since we first launched (inspecting your credit reports year round). myTruston Plus includes what you get with Free, the four new prevention/privacy features, and our ID theft recovery tools. Also, the price for the Plus service is reduced 50% to just $10 a month!

What I like about these new features is they begin to address the growing problem of synthetic identity theft. Synthetic identity theft occurs when different parts of people's identity are crafted to form another one. This is getting to be a big problem, which is expected to get worse.

In the near future, employers will have to take action when they have employees, who have social security numbers that don't match their names. In the past, this was never enforced, and social security numbers could be made up (literally).

With this new development, up to 20 million illegal immigrants are going to have to use social security numbers that match an identity. This could lead to an explosion in the already staggering amount of identity theft that is occurring.

Watching your identity carefully, is probably a better idea than ever before.

The Chexsystems alerts are a part of this new effort. Fraudulent checks that tie into identity assumptions do not always show up on credit reports.

In case you missed the Certegy data breach, where 8.5 million people's checking account information was compromised, this might be something that will help a few people out there. Please note this compromise was accomplished by a not very honest insider, therefore no amount of computer security could have stopped it.

Two other enhancements are the ability to put yourself on the no-call lists and stop all those pre-approved credit offers. Most privacy experts recommend we do this to avoid having our information sent all over the place.

Tom, whom I speak to on a semi-regular basis, has indicated that he and his team are working on even more enhancements to provide more value to his service in the future.

They are also working with industry partners to bundle their services and provide them as an option to a wider audience, who might want to a take a more private approach to preventing, or recovering from, identity theft.

I would highly recommend getting in touch with Truston if you are providing these services to your employees, or perhaps considering providing them to your customers.

Victims of identity theft are sometimes cautious about giving up their information after they've been victimized. MyTruston provides a viable solution for these customers, as well as, customers who are careful about protecting their privacy.

For the full announcement, which includes a free trial period for current customers on the paid services (you don't have to provide a credit card number, then remember to cancel)link, here.

I've noticed this is another neat marketing trick (requiring a credit card) employed by a lot of entities offering services for free lately. I suspect they count on busy and forgetful people like me, who forget to cancel the service.

PS: I got to know Tom from his blog and work as an advocate for identity theft victims. If you are interested in identity theft or privacy issues, I highly recommend you consider it as another free resource, he provides.

Lifelock CEO's identity theft case dropped - authorities cite coercion as the reason

No one can dispute that Lifelock -- the identity theft protection company offering a million dollar guarantee -- is pretty aggressive in their marketing tactics. They pay everyone from bloggers to the likes of Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh and Fred Thompson to promote their products.

It now appears that marketing isn't the only thing they are aggressive at.

Recently, as a result of a New Times article, their founder Robert Maynard stepped down from his position after it was suggested that his stories of being an identity theft victim weren't exactly one-hundred percent accurate. Even more damaging was an allegation that Maynard used his father's identity to secure a American Express card that went bad.

The identity theft story had been often heralded as one of the reasons behind the Lifelock business concept.

Even though Maynard stepped down, it appears he is still making money from Lifelock and hawking it's products. At the time of this announcement a rumor came out that Todd Davis, Lifelock's CEO -- who plasters his social security number all over the Internet to show his confidence in Lifelock -- was himself a victim of identity theft.

It has now come to light that Mr. Davis wasn't happy with the Texas authorities sense of urgency on his personal matter and took it upon himself to send a film crew and Lifelock representative (private-eye) to his evil twin's house to get him to sign a prewritten confession.

Apparently, the suspect was told to either sign the prewritten confession and agree to community service, or the Police would be out to arrest him. None of the articles, I read indicated, whether or not, the suspect had any part in preparing the prewritten confession.

In defense of the authorities concerned, there is a lot of identity theft to investigate. It turns out they were waiting for additional evidence to tie the suspect into the use of Davis' identity. The evidence they were waiting for was records from ATT to verify the suspect's Internet Protocol address, which they had already subpoenaed.

Although, not specifically stated, this leads me to believe that the theft using Mr. Davis' identity was originated, where a lot of this type of theft starts, or on the Internet.

It also appears that the authorities had advised Davis to let them do their job, and he decided to do otherwise.

The person involved doesn't appear to be a very sophisticated identity thief. He is described by the Fort Worth authorities as "mentally disabled."

All I have to say is that it doesn't help Davis' marketing efforts when a mentally disabled person is able to commit identity theft using the social security number, he put up all over the Internet. Of course, the suspect in this case can't be considered very bright, either. Apparently, he got the social security number right off Lifelock's website, where Davis is basically daring someone to steal it.

I have to wonder if he wanted to get caught?

It doesn't seem reasonable when a film crew and private investigator use "pretty questionable tactics" (my opinion) to resolve the crime. Of course, this isn't only my opinion because the authorities in question have now dropped the case because of the sloppy investigative tactics referred to as "coercion."

To put this in perspective, this suspect, who is described as mentally disabled, stole $500.00 using Davis' identity, which is plastered on the Internet for all to see. According to the original New Age article, Maynard, who was or maybe still is his business partner, allegedly ran up a $170,000 tab using his father's identity.

We don't see Lifelock dispatching private eyes and a film crew to track down Maynard.

There was speculation when the original post came out on Lifelock someone was orchestrating a hit job on them. I don't know, if this is true, but Lifelock seems to leave themselves wide open for attack.

When reading about this post, I came upon a rather amusing summary of the Lifelock saga, written by Robert Cringley at InfoWorld entitled:

Dumb, dumber, and Davis

On a closing note, I am an advocate of pursuing identity thieves to the fullest extent of the law. However, we must always realize that in our zeal to do so, people have rights, which need to be protected, also.

There has been recent evidence of innocent people being charged with crimes because their identity was stolen. This makes it even more important to ensure that the person being charged is actually the guilty party.

Here is a post, I did about the wrong people being charged with a crime because their identities were stolen.

Lifelock founder (Robert Maynard Jr.) resigns, while Fred Thompson takes heat for pitching the company

Kim Zetter from Wired News announced this today:

LifeLock co-founder Robert Maynard, Jr. has resigned from his position with the identity theft protection company following a story published in the Phoenix New Times about his past, which I wrote about last week. CEO Todd Davis left me a voicemail message this morning saying, "Even though we found no merit to any of the claims made by the New Times article . . . Robert Maynard has chosen to step down from the company so we don't allow any distractions or anyone have the ability to question the integrity of LifeLock and our service offering. . . . He is now no longer an executive or officer of the company as of this time."

Although, reading further, it appears Robert will still have something to do with the company:

Davis acknowledged that Maynard, Jr., still owns 10 percent equity in LifeLock and that he is launching a marketing company. When asked if Maynard will work as a contractor for LifeLock doing the same marketing work he was until now doing as a staff member, Davis said yes.

The article also revealed that Todd Davis, LifeLock's CEO -- who post's his own social security number all over the place, to market LifeLock's services -- recently became an identity theft statistic, himself.

Interesting read from Kim Zetter, here.

Meanwhile, Fred Thompson is taking heat for pitching Lifelock. Not sure if this is really fair. A lot of news organizations and other radio personalities from Rush Limbaugh to Howard Stern (strange combination) have pitched Lifelock in the past.

Why is everybody picking on Fred, and Fred, only?

MSNBC story, here.

To read the original post, I did on Lifelock, click here.