Identity Theft and ID Theft Protection Services

Identity Theft

Identity Theft Protection Services

Identity Theft Protection Services are now available on the web. They offer similar services, and vary mainly with the amount of money they will guarantee to spend to recover your (money, credit rating, identity) if you are unfortunate to become a victim. They generally cost around ten bucks a month - so what do you get for your money?

What they do is the stuff that we should do ourselves: monitoring our credit, setting alerts on the credit reporting companies, removing your name from the financial junk mail lists (the cause of a lot of identity theft - please shred the credit card offers, before trashing them!) and identifying the places to call should fraud occur.

Now most of this could be done by yourself, with little or no cost, but the difference is these organizations know what to look for, they know all the places to notify and generally help you avoid the hassle.

But In Addition (and here's the clincher), they also provide a security blanket/insuarnce policy that pays out if, after all these good steps, something goes wrong. They'll cover the stolen money, pay for new identity documents, pay for lawyers .... do whatever it takes (up to their service guarantee limit) to restore your status quo. Worth $10/month? We think so!

The Identity Theft Protection Service Providers

The two biggest players, who are in direct competition are IdentityTruth and LifeLock). Lifelock have been around a little longer but IdentityTruth is aggressively taking market share by matching and adding services and making a $2 million service guarantee. Scamdex has championed these services in the past but it's nice to see a little competition and on a side-by-side comparison, IdentityTruth seems to provide the best value for money.

How trustworthy are they (Will they pay up)?

There is a little controversy about the owner of Lifelock which ScamBusters documented extremely well but Scamdex is still happy to recommend them, based on their financial backers and reputation to date. As can be seen from the table below, all are US-based and privately funded. You do have to exercize a certain amount of trust when you signup with them, to give them power of attorney to access financial records on your behalf - if that makes you uneasy then do some more research.

Signing up for some of these services from the Scamdex website even gets you a discount and helps Scamdex keep running :')

ID Theft Protection Companies - How they Rack Up

A comparison of a few of the organizations providing Identity Theft Protection services.

Other Anti-Scammer Organizations

The Anti-Phishing Working Group (http://www.antiphishing.org):
    http://www.antiphishing.org/solutions.html