Quality and Warranty
LifeLock offers a $1 million insurance stating it will reimburse you “dollar for dollar” should the worst happen and your identity gets stolen. A closer look at their pricing structure reveals, however, that the company’s reimbursement limit depends on your subscription. In other words, you need to subscribe to a high-tier plan to have that $1 million protection.
The company also offers monthly and yearly subscriptions complete with a 60-day money-back guarantee. You can cancel any time without incurring early cancellation fees, too.
Features
Personal data monitoring – one user can track one Social Security Number, and only one driver’s license number, which is understandable. But you can also track your mother’s maiden name, up to 10 bank accounts and credit cards, up to five addresses, emails, and phone numbers.
Alerts – whenever the service detects your address in online searchable documents or identifies that someone is trying to open a bank account in your name using your SSN, it alerts you immediately via email, phone, or text, based on your preferences. If a financial transaction is in question, you can approve or reject it from the dashboard or mobile app.
Lost wallet assistance comes handy if you should ever need help getting a new driver’s license, credit cards, or insurance cards.
Bank account monitoring is the one feature that makes LifeLock worth the investment. LifeLock will monitor your bank account for any fraudulent activity by using read-only access to view your recent transactions. You can review your transactions directly from LifeLock interface, too, but the major benefit here is the company will keep an eye on your account to secure lines of credit.
You can also customize your alerts and receive notifications for transactions exceeding a certain amount.
Note: LifeLock lets you monitor your 401K account, a feature you won’t find with many competitors in the field.
LifeLock mobile app for iOS and Android gives you access to all the resources you have in your browser-based dashboard. Notably, in many cases, competitors’ mobile apps come with chopped functionality. But LifeLock’s app is polished and advanced, letting you approve or reject financial transactions and chat with LifeLock customer service.
Dark Web monitoring – LifeLock monitors black market sites where identity thieves sell stolen IDs and alerts you if it finds your data is up for sale.
LifeLock can also remove your name from pre-approved credit card mailing lists often targeted by identity thieves.
Price
LifeLock doesn’t have the easiest-to-digest pricing structure. The three plans on its pricing page may or may not reflect discounts, but the actual roster of plans contains more than a dozen items. It is this list you want to check before subscribing because it includes the prices without the discounts, which is what you get to pay when your next billing period is due.
LifeLock Standard for one user is priced at $9.99/mo or $109.89/year and gets you SNN monitoring, credit alerts from one bureau, and up to $25,000 coverage for identity fraud-related losses.
LifeLock Advantage for one user costs $219.89/year or $19.99/mo and adds alerts about credit card and banking activity, as well as monitoring for crime recors. It also raises cover for ID theft losses to $100,000.
LifeLock Ultimate Plus costs $29.99/mo or $32.89/year and gets you up to $1 million reimbursements for stolen funds, as well as alerts for 401K and investment activities. It also adds three bureau credit reports and score monitoring.
Also, LifeLock Junior addon costs $5.99/mo or $65.99/year, while LifeLock Senior addon is priced at $19.99/mo or $219.89/year for both of your parents. But if you want to add your spouse to your plan, you have to pay the full price. As a result, your LifeLock bill can quickly bloat if you’re going to monitor data of your entire family.
For additional $3-$5/mo, you can get Norton Security Online to any of these plans. It might block malware attacks and protect your Win, Mac, Android, and iOS devices from spyware. Since it’s a Symantec product, which ranks high among consumer antivirus suites, Norton could be worth the investment, but the full Norton Security suite is still more robust than its online sibling.
LifeLock doesn’t offer a free trial but backs your purchase with a 60-day money-back guarantee and zero dollars early termination fees.
Support
LifeLock provides 24/7 customer service via toll-free phone number. Its identity restoration agents, however, are only available during business hours, which makes sense because they have to work with banks and other institutions to resolve identity theft-related disputes.
Installation
LifeLock web-based dashboard offers a clean and intuitive user interface complete with credit scores, recent alerts, reports, self-descriptive tabs, and a wealth of useful information in the FAQs section. Its mobile app allows editing information and approving or rejecting transactions, as well as receiving alerts, and contacting the customer service directly.
Things to Consider
- LifeLock’s reputation is not perfect. FTC fined it $12 million for deceptive advertising practice in 2010, and another $100 million in 2015 for failure to apply critical security measures to protect consumer data – a sequence of ironic precedents for an ID theft protection company.
- USA Today picked up a story about a woman whose ex-husband opened a fraudulent LifeLock account to spy on her. When the victim contacted LifeLock for assistance, the company tried to blame it on her, refusing to acknowledge the responsibility.
- LifeLock provides credit report monitoring on a yearly basis.
- The $1 million insurance is actually a part of the high-tier plan only.
- Their low-tier plans provide limited protection without financial monitoring.
Important Tips
You have to provide LifeLock with a limited power of attorney for the company to assist you in restoring your identity and credit score, should your identity be compromised.
