Identity Guard Review

Identity Guard is a credit monitoring service that provides insurance against identity theft as well. We’ll this service and how it stacks up versus the competition.

As a Credit Monitoring Service – As a credit monitoring service, Identity Guard provides the following features.

As an Identity Protection Service – The “identity protection service” that Identity Guard offers is actually simply the credit monitoring service. Customers are provided with a one million dollar insurance in the event of an identity theft. Should your ID be stolen, Identity Guard has a team to help you resolve it. They also monitor the internet for clues and signs that your ID or address is being used by others. They also have a lost wallet service where they will actually call your credit card companies and banks on your behalf if you lose your wallet.

Cost – The cost for this service is $14.95 a month with a 30-day free trial.

Verdict and Opinion – After looking at the features of Identity Guard, I find that its credit monitoring service and ability to let you have all three credit scores from the major credit bureaus makes this a really good credit monitoring service. There are many such services around (including those by the credit bureaus themselves). While all three provide you with credit reports in a format which allows you to compare them side by side with each other (you can get one credit report for free each year by the way), most do not give you all three credit scores. So if you get a credit monitoring service from TransUnion for example, you only get TransUnion scores, but not Equifax or Experian’s.

As a identity theft protection, it falls short of the service provided by folks like Lifelock, who will actually call you when a lender or creditor request to check your credit bureaus (this is real on time protection). Identity Guard merely monitors your credit bureaus though it also scans the internet for possible use of your ID and address. The only issue I have with this feature is that they do not state clearly where they are doing the monitoring.

Hence, I think that if you are looking just for a credit monitoring service and want access to your three credit scores all the time, then the Identity Guard® Total Protection is one of the best credit monitoring service out there. If you are really concerned about ID theft, Lifelock would be the better alternative (the only problem with Lifelock is that though you also get credit monitoring services, you cannot see your three credit scores).