Credit watch services, ie $50-100 a year

[Miramonti]

As easy as its getting to be a victim of identity theft, and as hellish as the stories can be of those who have been victims, I'm getting paranoid of protecting a credit score that I've worked hard build up over the last 10 years, and yet have it destroyed abruptly.

I'm considering subscribing to a credit monitoring service, such as one of the options below, but am debating whether or not its worth it. No doubt these firms love the hacking going on so they can profit from the fear generated by it, and I hate to feed into that, but maybe it can be worthwhile insurance to protect credit.

Equifax
$50 yr - one credit report, weekly key change emails
$100 yr - unlimited credit reports, daily key change emails

TransUnion
$44 yr ($11 qtr) - weekly key change emails, 1 quarterly report
+24 yr ($6 qtr) - quarterly credit score updates
+24 yr ($6 qtr) - quarterly total debt summary

Experian
$120 yr ($10 mth) - daily key change emails, unlimited access to credit report/PLUS score (same as fico?).

All of these also offer better customer service to help resolve identity theft, and also usually offer various levels of 'insurance' ($) to cover a victims expenses involved with recovering from it.


Thoughts, experiences?

 

[conjur]

http://www.privacyguard.com or http://www.mycreditkeeper.com let you check all three reports daily (but ignore the FAKO scores you get.)

The former is $1 for 2 months then you get hit hard. The latter is monthly.

Also, http://www.myfico.com will actually monitor your true EQ FICO score for a few $/mo.

The scores you get from the individual bureaus are NOT your FICO score.

 

[Miramonti]

Originally posted by: conjur
http://www.privacyguard.com or http://www.mycreditkeeper.com let you check all three reports daily (but ignore the FAKO scores you get.)

The former is $1 for 2 months then you get hit hard. The latter is monthly.

Also, http://www.myfico.com will actually monitor your true EQ FICO score for a few $/mo.

The scores you get from the individual bureaus are NOT your FICO score.

Thanks for the info conjur. They are fairly similar to the others, daily updates of credit report changes for a single agency (not all 3), and one-time viewing of the credit report up front. Creditkeeper is $120yr ($10 a month), while Privacyguard is either $120 yr. (w/daily update emails) or $100 yr. (monthly updates).

Myfico monitors one agency for you (always equifax in this case) daily like the others, and sends updates upon detection of "important" changes, and includes the new fico with each alert that indicates an important change. $80 yr or $8 a month. A drawback is that it gives you only 2 "score power" reports a year (including running one upon subscribing), which is the only way to detect what the actual changes are when an email alert is received of a changed fico score. (and they seem to have no phone number to call to make sure I understand this right 😉)

 

[conjur]

PG and MCK allow you to pull your reports from all 3 bureaus and view them online. You get much more than just daily emails. Many people involved in credit repair use the PG/MCK method for daily pulls since they're pretty cheap. Then, at milestone dates, they pull their real FICO reports.