Reader Question: Are credit bureau fraud alerts still available?

Posted by Joe on April 1st, 2008

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This post is another in our ongoing series of “Reader Questions”. if you have a question of your own on any of the services we cover please use our contact form to let us know.

Q:With respect to the Identity Theft company comparisons that you provide, Identity Guard states the following during an enrollment process:

As of April 2, 2008, the Credit Bureau Fraud Alert feature will no longer be offered through your Identity Guard service.

It seems to me that without this important feature, they are no longer worth the higher cost of $14.99 cost per month.

Have the other services such as LifeLock also discontinued this feature?

A: You are correct in that Identity Guard is in the process of discontinuing their fraud alert feature. They are the only service that we are aware of that is planning to discontinue fraud alerts. LifeLock most certainly still allows their members to set fraud alerts as a part of their identity theft protection service.

Identity Guard will continue to provide three bureau credit report monitoring that will allow you to monitor chanegs to your credit report with Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. This is a service that LifeLock does not provide, although LifeLock will give you one free credit report per year as part of the annual credit report program.

If fraud alerts are important to you, and we feel that fraud alerts are a very important part of preventative identity theft protection, then LifeLock is the best service from our perspective.

• NextAdvisor reviews Identity Truth
• Reader Question: How do I set a fraud alert on my credit report?
• Reader Question: What should I do if I think I have been a victim of identity theft?
• Identity Theft Shield from Kroll and Pre-Paid Legal Review
• Identity Guard provides extensive identity theft protection and detection