With criminals growing more and more technologically advanced, combating identity theft has become “one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century,” LifeLock CEO says.

Identity theft is one of the fastest growing crimes in America, victimizing over 10 million people a year and costing consumers and businesses billions of dollars. Millions of people keep financial and personal information on their computers. Thousands fall victim to e-mail “phishing” scams each year. Social networking sites such as FaceBook and MySpace and peer-to-peer file sharing programs have opened up new avenues for identity thieves to access the personal and financial data of individuals more easily than ever.

Identity theft can happen anywhere to anyone. You can have your personal information stolen (and not even know it) while in line at the store, at the gas pump or even online at home. If your identity is stolen, you can spend hundreds of hours cleaning up your credit and struggling to get back your good name.

Todd Davis is the CEO of LifeLock, and he has purposely published his Social Security number in order to highlight the threat posed by identity thieves. Todd Davis relies on LifeLock to protect his name and personal information, just like it does for the approximately 1.7 million others who rely on LifeLock as well. Sure, he’s had his identity stolen and his information used illegally – 13 times in fact – a number which pales in comparison to the number of attempts that were foiled by the protections put in place by LifeLock. His story clearly illustrates the looming threat facing millions of consumers every day. And while LifeLock is doing their part, they cannot do it alone.

LifeLock, the industry leader in proactive identity theft protection, offers a proven solution that works. Although LifeLock has made it very clear that no service can stop 100% of identity theft, and although LifeLock has been leading the industry by continuously developing new and innovative proactive solutions, compromises do still occur – which is why in the last eight months alone LifeLock has provided more than 310,000 alerts to its members.

As a company, LifeLock is doing its best to protect consumers. As a country, a lot of work needs to be done. Unfortunately, identity thieves develop new technologies faster than legislation can be passed to stop them. We need to make combating identity theft a top national priority. Lawmakers at all levels of government must to take the ever-increasing threat of identity theft seriously. Identity theft is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century and it’s going to take a comprehensive public-private partnership to address the monumental challenges we all face.

Tags: LifeLock, Todd Davis

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 2:05 pm and is filed under LifeLock. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.