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Poor Experience with LegalShield

With all of the recent news of Equifax being hacked I still felt secure, because for the past several years I have been a member of LegalShield which provides a credit security auditing service called IDshield. Today I wanted to update my automated monthly payment from PayPal to a different credit card, so I went to login, that’s when the first problem showed up. My username and password weren’t accepted, so then I tried clicking the link for Forgot Your Password.

The form at Forgot Your Password didn’t accept my username, so now I was kind of stuck. The recourse was to phone their support line at 800 654 7757. On my first call the pre-recorded message ran for about 15 seconds, then went silent, then it disconnected me.

On the second phone call attempt I waited on hold for about 2 1/2 minutes, then was disconnected. My patience is starting to wear a bit thin at this point.

Finally, on the third phone call I did get a human to answer and they revealed that I had written down the wrong username, so once that was out of the way I could login to their web site just fine. I changed my automated monthly payment to a different credit card, then noticed that I had a dependent listed on the account, but several pieces of information were missing:

  • Date of birth
  • Last four digits of Social Security Number
  • Email
  • Phone number

I dutifully filled out these four fields and clicked the Submit button, but was then met with an ugly error message:

Notice:ERROR: Update java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException: String index out of range: -2

Being a web developer I knew that this was a serious issue, because you never want a web visitor to fail at saving their fields. I noticed a Chat link on the web page, so clicked it and had the following conversation:

Legalshield chat

LegalShield[1:16 PM] Welcome to LegalShield!

LegalShield[1:16 PM] A Member Services Agent will be with you shortly.

Stephanie[1:16 PM] Good Afternoon. My name is Stephanie, how may I assist you?

Daniel J Payne[1:17 PM] When I try to update Dependent Information the form throws an error: Notice:ERROR: Update java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException: String index out of range: -2

Stephanie[1:18 PM] What information are you trying to update?

Daniel J Payne[1:19 PM] For my Dependent I tried to enter XXXX for the SS# last four digits, but it truncated it to XX instead. The error occurs when I enter a phone number: XXX XXX XXXX, and email: xxxx.xxxx@gmail.com

Stephanie[1:20 PM] I’m sorry about that, I can take care of updating that information for you. The SSN is correct because anytime the last 4 starts with a zero it will not show it so that is why you only see XX. Just one moment please while I update that information for you.

Stephanie[1:21 PM] Okay I have that information updated for you. Is there anything else I can assist you with?

Daniel J Payne[1:21 PM] The Dependent phone number doesn’t save properly, still throwing that error message.

Stephanie[1:22 PM] I have added that number to your plan for you, it won’t let a phone number be saved under the dependent information it has to be under the named member which is completed.

Daniel J Payne[1:23 PM] Very odd, seems like a broken form to me, not exactly feeling secure.

Stephanie[1:24 PM] I’m sorry about that but the website is secure it just won’t allow for a dependent phone number to be added. Is there anything else I can assist you with?

Daniel J Payne[1:24 PM] Can you please ask the web development team to remove the field for Dependent phone number?

Stephanie[1:24 PM] I will send that over for review, not a problem.

LegalShield[1:25 PM] Chat session ended.

 

Summary

The folks at Legalshield need to fix two things right away:

  1. Automated phone system – no more disconnects
  2. Dependent fields – if they request info, then they need to save it successfully, not throw error messages

 

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