If you watch TV late at night or Saturday in the early afternoon, chances are you’ve come across Kevin Trudeau.  He’s been a fixture on the infomercial circuit for well over a decade.  His most recent offering is the book Debt Cures They Don’t Want You to Know About.  This follows a line of books about “…Cures They Don’t Want You to Know About”.  Kevin represents the worst in informercial marketing and he’s had his trouble with the FTC and FDA in the past.  In August the FTC hit him again with a $5 Million fine and a ban from infomercial for 3 years.  Stuff like this hasn’t stopped him in the past, so he’ll be back in three years if he can’t find a way to skirt the ruling before then.  Though the recent ruling is for the weight loss book he put out a few years ago, his recent debt book isn’t much better.

It’s been years since I’ve actually received one of the famous “Nigerian Business Opportunities”, but it seems they are still out fishing for Mugus (Nigerian for fool).  I came across a pair of fun sites a while back that I thought I’d share.  The Nigerian Fraud Email Gallery has a plethora of emails that have been sent out.  If you have time, they can be interesting to read.  The other site, The Scam Baiter, takes a proactive approach by turning the scammers into Mugus.  It’s a chance to waste the scammer’s time and get some good laughs out of it.

Well, if we’ve learned anything this week it’s that keeping your identity safe isn’t helped by posting your social security number on billboards and magazine ads all over the country.

Two years ago, Todd Davis, the founder of LifeLock, decided to plaster his Social Security number wherever he could get ad space. For a fee of about $10 a month, LifeLock offers what it calls a “proven solution” that prevents its customers from becoming victims of identity theft and fraud. I wrote about whether a solution like this is worth the money a few weeks ago (Is ID Theft Protection Necessary)… and apparently it’s not.

One man in Texas has already succeeded in getting a payday loan in Davis’ name. However, when asked about the breach Davis stressed that his service does not guarantee that your I.D. won’t be stolen. Rather, it aims to reduce the likelihood that your I.D. is stolen, and if it is, LifeLock promises to fix the problem.

But that’s not the real problem. LifeLock’s current problem is dealing with lawsuits of up to 105 of people who now claim that LifeLock didn’t live up to its advertising and have suffered at the hands of identity thieves.

So what can you do to prevent 83 people from trying to access your personal information? The answer is not LifeLock. The answer, as of today, does not involve only one approach. You need to be active in monitoring your own credit, and perhaps combine your own efforts with a service such as LifeLock… to help you with the monotonous lifting. Take a read through Is ID Theft Protection Necessary and try and follow the suggestions I’ve made. Monitoring your own credit, placing freezes on your credit, and many other “tricks” can keep you one step ahead of the game.

Think you’re doing what it takes from thieves to steal your identity? Find out by taking the ID Safety Test at IDsafety.net, a site created by Javelin Strategy and Research to raise awareness about identity fraud.