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IDENTITY THEFT INFO > LEARN the Truth > Why You Don’t Need a Credit Monitoring Service (Or, Why buy what you can have for free?)

Why You Don’t Need a Credit Monitoring Service (Or, Why buy what you can have for free?)

Over the last three years, some 49 million Americans were told that their personal information was lost, stolen or improperly disclosed by government agencies, banks or various other companies, according to a recent survey by Harris Interactive.

The solution, say the nation’s three major credit bureaus (among many other independent companies), is credit monitoring. For $60 to $180 a year, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion claim they’ll protect you from identity theft by regularly watching for changes in your credit report. About 24 million customers have signed up, according to Javelin Strategy and Research, a California-based company.

If you’re a confused and frightened customer (like most of us are when it comes to identity theft), you could end up believing one of these “Identity Theft Protection” promises, influenced by the fanfare of the marketing campaign.

But you really shouldn’t.  Some of the most effective identity theft protection tools for consumers are... free.  Yes, you read that correctly:  Free.  Or, at the very least, at a nominal fee.

These tools include Fraud Alerts, Credit Locks and Credit Freezes, Pre-screen/Opt-out Lists, the National Do Not Call Registry, and everyone’s favorite, Free Annual Credit Reports.

Any quick Internet search will provide you with a limitless selection of identity theft protection choices – from a variety of companies ready to offer you (and charge you for) tools that revolve around what is essentially free to you already.  But instead of offering them to you at no cost, they’ll instead charge you as much as $100 or more per year.

BUNK ALERT:  As you might expect, like any burgeoning industry, there’s going to be a lot of opportunists out there alongside the legitimate businesses. The best will offer real services the ordinary customer either doesn’t want to do themselves or would spend a lot of time doing (if they chose the do-it-yourself route). Charging a fee to monitor the Web for you to find out if your personal information is being released without your permission is a helpful tool, but simply offering credit freezes for $100 a year is not.

Still, there’s also the argument that you can wash your clothes by hand instead of using a machine.  People are often too busy to worry about checking their credit reports every quarter.  So if you’re one of those I-like-the-convenience customers, knock yourself out.

Hence, it almost seems inevitable that consumers will continue to pay as much as $100 or more per year for services that they could essentially have for free, or for a nominal fee, if they were to be properly directed...

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