Life Lock protects you against ID theft.

Life Lock

Students and old-age pensioners particularly, are easy victims for Identity thieves. Even bloggers who use credit cards or get tons of junk mail on the Internet are at risk. Purchasing groceries from your local store, online at home or when you’re buying your movie ticket, you are vulnerable. If your identity is stolen, you can spend many frustrating hours alerting your bank, informing your creditors and proving your credit-worthiness.

That’s because stolen identities are used over and over, with most victims only discovering the theft after they’ve been turned down for a loan. LifeLock will prevent this from happening.

LifeLock works by setting free fraud alerts on your behalf.

A fraud alert is activated when your ID is stolen. Your creditors, ie. your bank or clothing store where you have an account will confirm whenever a purchase is made that the purchase is in fact being made by you and not someone else.

With your fraud alerts in place, creditors, lenders, or other prospective users of your consumer report must take steps to prove your identity before they can:

• Issue you with a new credit card
• Increase your credit
• Grant a loan
• Create new accounts

After a fraud alert has been activated, any creditor offering you increased credit, or wanting to use your credit file to grant you new credit or an extension of credit in your name should contact you before proceeding. Any attempt to obtain increased credit on any of your accounts will be checked to determine whether the application is legitimate and not the action of an ID thief. Most of the time, when someone else is trying to use your identity to get credit, the fraud alert set up by LifeLock will stop them.

Some LifeLock reviews tell it like it is.

Kim Barnes relates an incident which happened while she was on a family vacation. Her husband received a phone call asking him if he had applied for a new credit card. Someone had been attempting to steal his identity and open a credit card account fraudulently. LifeLock was activated and the thief was stopped in his tracks.

Earl Laurie from Colorado had seen a news report about LifeLock on TV. On the show the CEO gave out his social security number. The reporter tried to use it to open new accounts and couldn’t. Earl then signed up with Lifelock. Later, he heard from that the Navy and the VA had lost his private information and someone had tried to open two credit card account under his name. They tried to steal his identity, but LifeLock came to the resue and saved him at least $30,000 and his good credit.

LifeLock will also check your credit details every 90 days unless otherwise directed by you.

LifeLock will also remove your name from pre-approved credit card and junk mail lists. Stats show that this is one of the many ways that thieves hijack identities. Plus, who needs junk mail? You can do this for free yourself, but if LifeLock does it for you, your ID is guaranteed up to $1,000,000.

LifeLock is certainly worth considering if you are an active consumer. Come hell or high water, your ID will be protected.

Post it today!

In the days before blogging, actually meant writing a letter on a piece of paper, popping it in an envelope and posting it in the mailbox down the road.

Then we would wait excitedly for a reply from a lover or a friend, check our mailboxes every day to see if he/she had replied. As bloggers, we are aware of making regular posts, but how often do we think about writing an actual letter? And if we do still indulge in that rather quaint way of communicating, what about updating that tired old mailbox on your front wall. There are some unique and different new mail box designs available.

From a slimline high tech-look for your modern loft apartment to the multifunctional or single slot-type mailbox, it is worth giving it some thought, or that precious letter may go missing. Friends of mine have been hinting very subtlely that perhaps I should do some thinking on this. As they enter my gate, they make a pont of closing the wooden door on our old wooden mailbox, remarking at the same time that it is a wonder that I don’t lose more mail. They are right of course. The door is jamming and getting old – in winter it tends to swell up and not close properly.

My mailbox is about half the size and depth of a shoebox. As a result the newspaper delivery guy has to fold the paper over twice to try and squeeze it behind the door. Mostly, though, he just throws it over the garden gate, where it is invariably snapped up by our dog. If it doesn’t get eaten it often gets rained on. Depending on the force of the delivery guy’s throw, it often travels through a prize flowebed on its trajectory path, decapitating a rose or two on the way.

So, this year, come hell or high water, I am going to treat myself to a new mailbox, preferrably multifunctional, with a tiny slot for the bills, a dog and weather-proof one for the newspaper and one for the fun stuff. Maybe I can even get one that has an automatic eject mechanism which detects junk mail. Now that would be really cool!