ID theft CEO dared thieves to take his Social Security number...so they did

MSNBC

Todd Davis, CEO of an identity-theft protection service called LifeLock, kept putting his Social Security number in TV commercials and daring somebody to take it. So he shouldn’t have been surprised when an identity thief did just that.

But Davis says it just proves that his LifeLock identity protection service works.

“My Social Security number has been out there for two years,” the jovial exec told TODAY’s Matt Lauer Friday. “There’s been one instance where someone was successful in trying to turn my identity into money. There have been 87 other attempts to steal my identity, but the system works.”

But some of his customers disagree with that claim. Attorney Davis Paris has filed a class action lawsuit in Maryland, West Virginia and New Jersey saying that Davis and LifeLock engage in false advertising by seeming to offer absolute protection against identity theft in their ubiquitous ads. Another lawsuit in Arizona alleges that his $1 million “service guarantee” is misleading and covers only defects in LifeLock services and not actual identity theft.