Lifelock And The Recommendations They Buy
If you are right and their advertising campaign is nothing more than the Lifelock scam you claim it to be, why are there literally thousands of people on the web recomending their credit monitoring services?
Because they get paid by Lifelock to recommend them, that’s why.
Lifelock pay $35 for every customer website owners send them and they don’t care too much about what those sites say or do to make the sale so please don’t contact me telling me that some identity theft guru or self proclaimed consumer watchdog expert somewhere is singing the praises of Lifelock because they aren’t, they are just making an easy $35.
Lifelock can afford to pay website owners $35 per customer because the average value of a customer to them is around $600 so it makes good business sense (Lifelock estimate customer lifespan to be 60 months).
There’s nothing wrong either with this type of marketing as a business model and many other companies run similar programs, Amazon being the largest and most successful at it I would guess.
The difference is that when a site for example is discussing the theory of ‘the big bang’ and its owner recommends a book by Stephen Hawking you pretty much much know what you will be getting in the post should you decide to click on his link, buy the book and earn the web site owner his small commission.
On the other hand, when some internet marketer sets himself up as an identity theft or personal security expert with a professionally designed site and starts telling his visitors that they ‘need’ Lifelock, he is doing so to make himself money and he more than likely doesn’t care whether Lifelock is a scam or not. All he wants is for you to click on the link and make him his $35
With the Lifelock ad campaigns running nationally with their false promises of ‘total protection’ it’s an easy sale for the internet marketer and it used to be even easier until Lifelock were threatened with a lawsuit for allowing their army of paid ’supporters’ to intercept the search engine users looking for other, less aggressively marketed identity theft protection companies.
Here’s what David Ridings, the CEO of one of those competitors -Namesafe - said at the time (June 08) they uncovered the scam:
“We have discovered that LifeLock has been sponsoring advertisements on most major search engines including Google, Yahoo, Lycos, MSN, Dogpile, and AOL, that deceptively led consumers to Lifelock.com. Specifically, when you searched ‘Namesafe.com’ in any major search engine, you found an advertisement that said ‘Namesafe.com’ but when you clicked on it, you were not directed to the official site for NAMESAFE, but rather to our competitor, LifeLock.com”
Anyone else see the irony of an identity theft protection company stealing another companies identity?
