InfoArmor Featured in Fortune Magazine
InfoArmor adds data protection to your dental and medical benefits
By Dinah Eng @FortuneMagazine June 13, 2013: 7:04 AM ET
Smith helped fund LifeLock before launching InfoArmor.
When InfoArmor founder and CEO Drew Smith secured seed money and a big contract from Washington Mutual in 2007, he thought his privacy-management company’s future was assured. But just 60 days before the firm was to roll out an identity-monitoring service for WaMu’s 10 million credit card holders, the U.S. Office of Thrift Supervision seized the struggling bank and placed it in receivership.
InfoArmor needed new customers — fast. Smith, who had been an angel investor in LifeLock (remember the TV spots in which its CEO broadcasts his Social Security number?), knew how competitive it would be to sell directly to consumers, so he instead began marketing his service to corporations that in turn offer identity protection as an employee benefit, alongside medical insurance and tuition reimbursement.
Smith’s fresh approach not only rescued InfoArmor, but also caught on with employers looking to save their employees the hassle — and lost productivity — of unraveling an identity theft (canceling credit cards, filing reports, etc.). Today more than 300 companies, including T-Mobile and Ford (F, Fortune 500), are customers, and InfoArmor’s sales last year hit $4.5 million.
“There’s no one doing what InfoArmor does,” company investor Austin Westerling, a partner with Granite Point Capital in Boston, says of the company’s business-to-business model. Some firms pay for all employees to be protected (the rate depends on company size). Others offer it as an optional benefit for about $8 a month.
InfoArmor’s corporate push comes as more consumers put themselves at risk via personal disclosures on websites and social media. Over 12.6 million Americans were victims of identity fraud in 2012, according to Javelin Strategy & Research. InfoArmor casts a wide net sleuthing for identity thieves. Its software tracks applications for everything from new cellphones to credit cards and brokerage accounts. Crucially, it taps into unlisted servers on the Internet black market, where e-mail addresses and passwords are sold.
Smith, 42, worked as a financial analyst and strategic planner for PepsiCo (PEP, Fortune 500) before getting his MBA from Harvard. He was selling real estate in Arizona when he became an angel investor for LifeLock, which went public in 2012. Smith cashed out before the IPO, selling his stake back to LifeLock for a 300% premium. He used the proceeds to fund the continued growth of InfoArmor in 2008.
The company is expanding into new markets. Medical insurance companies have started to hire InfoArmor to find fraudulent claims. Using member information, InfoArmor looks for unusual patterns of emergency room use or excessive purchases of medical equipment to uncover improper uses of members’ medical insurance information.
Consumers may need protection from identity theft, but InfoArmor has found success getting their employers to foot the bill.
This story is from the July 1, 2013 issue of Fortune.
SQLstream Powers Real-time Fraud Protection for InfoArmor
InfoArmor and SQLstream Team Up to Deliver the Next Generation of Continuous Identity Monitoring Services at Massive Scale
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–June 05, 2013–
SQLstream, Inc., the Streaming Big Data Company, today announced that InfoArmor, a U.S. leader in identity theft monitoring and internet surveillance, selected SQLstream as the real-time engine for the next generation of its identity monitoring and surveillance platform. SQLstream’s s-Streaming products enable InfoArmor to meet the rapid growth in demand for its real-time identity monitoring services. SQLstream was chosen for its capacity to capture, process and integrate in real-time high volumes of unstructured data coming from a large variety of sources, its massive scalability for high velocity real-time operational intelligence, and its simple, fast deployment.
Identity theft in the U.S. alone claimed 12.6 million victims in 2012, a rise of over 1 million from 2011, resulting in more than $21 billion in damages. InfoArmor’s identity protection services are helping detect and correct identity theft before any damage is done or costs incurred. Real-time identity theft monitoring has complex, rules-based alerting intelligence that must be applied over a large number of different data sources simultaneously.
“We needed a real-time operational intelligence platform that could scale to new levels of data acquisition, conditioning, analytics and alert delivery,” said Christian Lees, CTO of InfoArmor. “We evaluated building our own and explored other vendors, but chose SQLstream because they met our requirements entirely and they provided the only 100% ISO ANSI/SQL standards-based streaming platform. That enabled us massive scalability, a very fast deployment and a highly competitive TCO.”
The system captures and parses multiple data feeds in different XML-based formats. SQLstream parses and conditions the data feeds on the fly, and applies a sophisticated rules catalog across all data, delivering real-time alerts to consumers through SMS when rules and specific combinations of rules are breached.
“We’re delighted to have been chosen by InfoArmor for such a challenging operational Big Data requirement,” said Damian Black, CEO of SQLstream. “Seeing SQLstream making a real difference to people’s lives is a validation of our approach to operational intelligence and predictive analytics.”
Learn more about SQLstream’s security solutions today.
About InfoArmor
InfoArmor is a leader in offering identity theft protection and privacy management solutions to businesses. By focusing on employee benefits, InfoArmor provides a turn-key, value-adding benefit with easy employer administration. Rather than solely focusing on credit fraud, InfoArmor uses industrial strength technologies to enable consumers and businesses alike to monitor and identify fraudulent activity. For more information, visit http://www.infoarmor.com.
About SQLstream
SQLstream (www.sqlstream.com) is the pioneer and innovator of a patented streaming Big Data engine that unlocks the real-time value of high-velocity, high-volume unstructured machine data. SQLstream’s s-Streaming products put Big Data on Tap(TM) — enabling businesses to harness action-oriented and predictive analytics, with on the fly visualization and streaming operational intelligence from their log file, sensor, network and device data. SQLstream’s core V5 streaming technology is a massively scalable, distributed platform for analyzing unstructured Big Data streams using standards-based SQL, with support for streaming SQL query execution over Hadoop/HBase, Oracle, IBM, and other enterprise database, data warehouse and data management systems. SQLstream’s headquarters are in San Francisco, CA.
CONTACT: SQLstream
Ronnie Beggs, +1 877-571-5775
VP Marketing
Email: pr@sqlstream.com
Website: http://www.sqlstream.com
SOURCE: SQLstream, Inc.
Pulling Free Credit Reports
You should pull your free credit report from annualcreditreport.com to review the accounts listed and make sure they are indeed yours. Pull one credit report from a different bureau every four months to access your credit reports all year long. To obtain your Free Credit Report, please follow the steps listed below:
- Go to http://www.annualcreditreport.com
- Choose your state from the drop down menu & click “Request Report”
- Enter your personal information & click “Continue”
- Select which credit bureau to receive your credit report from. Note: Federal legislation requires all three bureaus to provide you with one free credit report each year. We recommend that you get a report from one bureau every four months to get a more accurate view of your credit report over time.
- Click “Next” & follow the directions
If you find fraudulent accounts, contact the merchant and let them know you have been a victim of identity theft. You may need to speak to someone in the company’s Risk Department to complete an identity theft affidavit and have the account closed. It may also be necessary and helpful to go into your local police station and file a police report stating that you have been a victim of identity theft.
Placing Fraud Alerts
To place Fraud Alerts, please click ONE of the three links below or contact them by phone. Once a fraud alert is placed with one credit reporting agency the other two agencies will be notified.
- Experian
Online: https://www.experian.com/fraud/center.html
Phone: 888-397-3742 - TransUnion
Online: http://www.transunion.com/personal-credit/credit-disputes/fraud-alerts.page
Phone: 800-680-7289 - Equifax
Online: https://www.alerts.equifax.com
Phone: 800-525-6285
Medical Misuse: Requesting Medical Information Bureau Report
Concerned about your medical information being compromised? Follow the instructions below to see if your information has been compromised.
Use the directions below to request your consumer file from the Medical Information Bureau (MIB). Note: MIB may not have a consumer file for you if you have not applied for health insurance or disability income insurance during the preceding seven year period.
- Call MIB at 866.692.6901 (Press 1; Press 1; Press 1)
- Authenticate yourself by answering a few personal questions
Upon receipt of your request for a Record Search and Disclosure, and proper identification, MIB will initiate the disclosure process and provide you with the following:
- The nature and substance of information, if any, that MIB may have in its consumer files pertaining to you;
- The name(s) of the MIB member companies, if any, that reported information to MIB; and,
- The name(s) of the MIB member companies, if any, that received a copy of your MIB consumer file during the twelve (12) month period preceding your request for disclosure.
You will receive your MIB consumer file through the mail within 14 days of your request.
Additional Precautions
Medpoint and Intelliscript are databases that track prescription drug history for up to five years prior. It is important that this information is correct because insurance companies can use your prescription history to make assumptions about what type of medical conditions you may have.
Use the directions below to request your prescription drug history from Medpoint:
- Call (888) 206-0335
- You will have to provide your full name, date of birth, full Social Security number, mailing address and/or physical address, name of insurance provider, telephone number
To get your history from Intelliscript:
- Call (877) 211-4816.
- You will have to provide your full name, mailing address, phone number, date of birth, last four digits of your Social Security number, and your email address if you want the report emailed to you
Social Media Scams
Most of the population takes part in one social media platform or another. Social media can be dangerous because people over share information that can be used to commit identity fraud. There are scams that target popular platforms with malicious links or ploys to share passwords or personal information without your knowledge. Additionally, any time you have an online account with a company you are at risk to have it exposed in a data breach.
Scams involving social media users are becoming more and more personalized and sophisticated, often using your name or appearing to come from a friend, which makes it difficult to identify that fact that it is a scam. It’s important to understand to how your activity online can affect your identity:
- If you receive links in messages, even if it is from a friend, don’t click on links within it. It can be malware that can damage your system and expose personal information stored on it.
- Check all your security settings to make sure your aren’t sharing too much information about yourself online.
- Report suspicious activities through the official social media website.
- Don’t accept requests from people you don’t know.
If you have questions about the internet safety or social media please contact us.
InfoArmor Selected as the Sole Identity Theft Provider for the Mercer Exchange
InfoArmor has been selected as the sole identity theft provider for the Mercer Exchange. To learn more about the exchange and read the official Mercer press release, click here.
Mercer has vetted many carriers and vendors to complete their exchange and InfoArmor is honored to have been selected. For more information on the Mercer exchange, contact Stephanie Poe at +1-202-331-5210 or InfoArmor at +1-480-302-6701.
