Protection Against Identity Theft: Your Choices

Several years ago, the identity of my brother was stolen. In less than five days, his bank account was hit with four $300 charges and the bank didn’t help much beyond cancelling those items from his balance. This go around wasn’t too bad, as the bank did side with him eventually, canned those fraudulent charges and gave him new account numbers.

The scary thing is that, even months later, there was still someone out there claiming to be my brother, and they even had his financial and personal information — enough to get into serious trouble.

My brother thankfully resolved the trouble with the bank. His credit still gets poked by mysterious charges every now and then. My brother was incredibly lucky.

Identity theft is a frightening thing. No one likes the idea of losing money or spending hour after frustrating hour tracking down mysterious charges on their credit reports. When people get scared, they start to do things they wouldn’t normally do, and some businesses begin offering services that offer to help their concerns. Identity theft has definitely freaked out enough people, and numerous businesses offer protective services for a fee.

No Tracking

Businesses offering protection against identity theft do not allow consumers to look at how effective their services are or whether they even help in the slightest.

One of their main claims to fame is this: these services frequent your credit report and take notice if any charges begin to accumulate for large sums. This way, nothing goes through without you knowing about it. You could do this for yourself — for free. So, excluding this, what do these businesses do?

There is no good answer to this question, which bothers every consumer who dares to pay these businesses money for theoretical security. Since there are no methods to tracking their actions, you have to accept everything they tell you as fact. The only way to measure their success is to consider if your identity has been stolen since you began working with them. If not, then it stands to reason that the new security must have paid off, right?

No. There are no guarantees.

What Features?

Pricing for protective services changes heartily from service to service depending on what they claim to do for you. There is no business out in Internet Land who explicitly states what they do and for how much and which ones are premium and which are not. Just about everything — yes, everything — these companies do for you, you can easily do on your own. For free.

It’s incredibly important when dealing with banks or anything involving credit or debt to stay safe and not disclose any additional information. This is more effective and will go farther protecting you than any protection against identity theft company you hire online.

One of the fastest growing concerns in our security is preventing identity fraud, so be serious and take steps to be safe. Try researching ways to stay safe online, even when accessing sensitive information, and check to see if there are solid products you can buy to help. Consider only trusted sites to give you real answers to your protection against identity theft questions.