LifeLock is the company whose CEO published his social security number to demonstrate the power of his system and dared hackers to steal his identity. Which they promptly did. Thirteen times.

Nonetheless they advertise broadly a credit monitoring service and help to fix things if your identity is stolen. Of course you can check your credit report for free, and you can call your credit card companies, you don’t really need them to keep a list of cards and card numbers for you, but some people find it convenient. And of course CreditKarma.com offers access to your report and updates to it free.

Once you get a credit monitoring alert, if your ID has been compromised you’re being notified after the fact. Trolling the net for instances of your social security number with a Tor browser isn’t likely to do much either.

They used to put an automatic freeze on your credit report, and continually renew the freeze, and wound up in a lawsuit over doing so (since they did it for all customers, versus when there’s a legitimate concern of identity being compromised).

Still the service may be useful for people who find looking through a free credit report and making sense of it too complicated. And goodness knows that the Equifax data breach, and each time there are breaches for major retailers, mean great advertising for LifeLock.

So if you’re someone that’s going to sign up for the service:

• Make sure you’re getting the best deal, 10% off seems pretty standard, at a minimum google ‘lifelock promo code’ or similar.

• Check out this new American AAdvantage offer of up to 12,000 miles on top of 10% off.

The big miles offer comes with their $26.99+ tax plan. There’s a lower miles offer for the $8.99 plan. Most of the miles are awarded right away (after 6-8 weeks of signup) for year one of service, and you can cancel any time. You won’t get 12,000 miles unless you keep the premium service into year 3.

If you’re going to sign up as a new customer for a year of lifelock you might as well get 10,000 miles for doing it! Some may be dissatisfied and cancel after their first year miles post. I do like 10,000 miles for $81-ish.

Key terms:

• Must be an active LifeLock member for 91 days to earn AAdvantage® miles.
  
• Please allow 6-8 weeks for AAdvantage® miles to post to your account.
  
• AAdvantage® members will earn 3,500 AAdvantage® miles for the first year of LifeLock Standard™ enrollment and 1,250 AAdvantage® miles for membership years 2 and 3 of LifeLock Standard enrollment.
  
• AAdvantage® members will earn 10,000 AAdvantage® miles for the first year of LifeLock Ultimate Plus™ enrollment and 1,000 AAdvantage® miles for membership years 2 and 3 of LifeLock Ultimate
  
• The additional AAdvantage® miles for years 2 and 3 will be posted to the AAdvantage® member’s account at the beginning of each of the respective membership years.
  
• You can cancel anytime without penalty by calling 1-800-LifeLock.
  
• Offer is for new LifeLock members only.

The normal offer through the AAdvantage Shopping Portal by the way is 20 miles per dollar so this is bigger.

On the other hand consider that you can get 13,000 United miles for LifeLock or 40% cash back through Ebates.