What type of identity theft protection is right for me?

Broadly speaking, we classify identity theft protection into three different types of fraud monitoring: credit report monitoring, automated credit bureau fraud alert settings, and public record/black market monitoring. We think all three types are very valuable and most services offer some combination of all three of these types.

Credit report monitoring is the most well known and established type of monitoring and also the only one you have no way of doing yourself for free. Credit report monitoring is very effective since the most common type of identity theft is opening a new credit account in your name and when that happens it will show up on at least one of your credit reports. We recommend monitoring all three bureaus as only monitoring one means accounts could be opened that are only reported to another bureau, rendering your monitoring useless.

LifeLock pioneered the automated credit bureau fraud alert settings, and they are the only service to still offer this feature. Setting fraud alerts with the credit bureaus means that there is a note placed on your credit file telling any company that is opening a new account with your Social Security number to confirm your identity, usually by calling a phone number you provide. In theory, this is a very good and proactive way to prevent identity theft, preventing an account from even being opened rather than catching the account after it's opened, but in practice there have been some problems with implementation. The main problem has been the claim by Experian, one of the credit bureaus, that it is illegal for a third-party company to set these on your behalf. So far, the courts have sided with Experian and we believe it is likely that LifeLock will have to stop this part of their service in the coming months. The other issue has been that it is actually quite easy to set fraud alerts yourself. You only need to set them at one bureau as each bureau must by law contact the other two bureaus to set fraud alert with them once you have placed the alert with the first bureau. The only catch is the alerts only last 90 days so if you are going to set them yourself and want continuous coverage, you need to reset them every 90 days. To set fraud alerts yourself online we recommend you visit Equifax's simple online fraud alert form.

Finally, public record/black market monitoring covers fraud monitoring done outside of your credit file so is a bit of a catch-all for many types of monitoring. Since many types of identity theft do not require access to your credit file, this type of monitoring is very important. While it is theoretically possibly to do this type of monitoring yourself, in practice it is not practical to monitor the thousands of different public records databases or find and keep up to date on the black market sites and chat rooms where stolen information is traded.

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