Avivah Litan, a fraud analyst with Gartner Inc., rattled off a long list of reasons why credit monitoring services arent much use to most consumers.
-Most wont tell you if a new wireless or cable service has been taken out in your name.
-They do nothing to monitor your bank account transactions, credit card accounts (for fraudulent charges), retirement accounts, brokerage accounts, loyalty accounts and more. And these are all areas where consumers should be very concerned about account takeover.
-They do nothing to tell you if a bad guy has hijacked your identity for non-financial purposes, i.e. to get a new drivers license, passport or other identity document. Of course a bad guy impersonating a consumer using a forged identity document can end up in prison, causing lots of problems for the victim whose identity was hijacked.
-They do nothing to stop tax fraud (typically tax refund fraud) against you. Same is true for other government benefit programs, i.e. medicare fraud, Medicaid fraud, welfare fraud, and Social Security fraud.
In short, they only give consumers limited help with a very small percentage of the crimes that can be inflicted on them, Litan said. And consumers can get most of that limited help for free via the government website or free monitoring from a breached entity where their data inevitably was compromised.
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