Identity Guard ID Theft Protection Review

Features

Let’s get one thing straight: There’s no service that can guarantee protection against identity theft. Mischievous actors on the internet use a variety of tactics to steal identities, from slimy and diabolical social engineering scams to downright hacking. Not to mention, there are plenty of other ways criminals steal identities outside the internet. Even with the highest-rated identity protection services, your identity can still be stolen.

The real purpose of identity protection is to catch early signs of identity theft so you can react and prevent legal, financial, and/or reputational damages. To do that, services monitor areas like credit accounts, the dark web, and court and public records – places where stolen identities often turn up.

To test out how quickly and how well Identity Guard detects signs of theft, we signed up for the Ultra plan, Identity Guard’s top-tier protection. It gave us complete access to all of its features from credit monitoring to identity monitoring. Here’s our experience.

Credit Monitoring

According to our Identity Theft Consumer Shopping Study, credit monitoring is a core function most shoppers look for. Fortunately, it’s also a common feature in identity protection services.

Identity Guard’s credit monitoring involved closely watching credit-related activities such as hard credit pulls and new loan applications. We applied for a student loan shortly after we signed up for Identity Guard’s protection, and we received an alert later in the day. If it were a fraudulent loan application, we would have been able to take immediate action like contacting the loan provider, freezing our credit, or putting a fraud alert on our credit account. Identity Guard would have helped us do the last one if needed.

Unfortunately, we learned that not all Identity Guard users enjoy credit protection. It’s reserved for the upper-tier plans like our Ultra plan, but is absent from the bottom-tier Value plan ($7.50 per month). We’ll get more into the pricing details below, but that shows that it pays to go with a more expensive plan – at least if you’re worried about credit fraud.

Here’s everything we got from our Ultra plan:

• Three-bureau credit monitoring
• Monthly credit score updates calculated based on our Equifax credit file
• Experian credit lock
• Three-bureau annual credit report

As for how Identity Guard compares to others, it’s all standard except for the Value plan’s lack of credit monitoring. As you can see in our LifeLock cost assessment, other companies offer basic credit monitoring even in their lowest-tier subscriptions. LifeLock in particular offers one-bureau credit monitoring with the entry-level and mid-level options, and three-bureau credit monitoring with the top-tier plan. So even if you sign up for the lowest subscription, LifeLock still gived you some level of credit protection. It’s a better option than Identity Guard if you want affordable credit monitoring, but if you want to learn more, see our LifeLock and Identity Guard comparison.

Financial Monitoring

Aside from credit changes, scores and reports, Identity Guard monitored our finances. Identity Guard kept a close watch on all our assets, from our 401(k) and investment accounts to high-risk transactions, debit and credit cards.

For instance, Identity Guard notified us and showed us a list of the personally identifiable information entered into our bank’s system when we set up a new account. This would have been helpful if it had been a case of identity theft, as we would have known which details were compromised, tracked where the leak came from, and avoided future incidents.

Like credit monitoring, we only had access to all financial monitoring features because we had the Ultra plan. The Value plan only includes monitoring for high-risk financial transactions and the Total plan adds in bank account monitoring. All features come with the Ultra plan including:

• Credit and debit card monitoring
• 401(k) and investment account monitoring
• Home title monitoring

Identity Protection

Identity protection is at the very core of Identity Guard subscriptions. Unlike with credit and financial monitoring, you’ll get all identity protection features no matter which plan you choose. But what is identity protection?

Basically, Identity Guard will ask you to provide information you want to protect – your name, address, Social Security Number, birthdate, and so on. If it sees any of that information in a data breach, on the dark web, and other places where stolen identities usually turn up, it will let you know immediately. Most types of identity theft start with a stolen piece of information, so the inclusion of identity protection in every Identity Guard plan is valuable.

Here’s exactly what we got from our Identity Guard subscription.

• Dark web scan: The dark web, an area of the internet in which all users remain anonymous, is a hotbed of cybercrime. As part of our membership, Identity Guard sent us alerts if it found our credentials on the dark web. The one time this occurred, Identity Guard explained the situation plainly and prompted us to change our passwords.
• Criminal and sex offense monitoring: If the system found our names on a sex offender registry or police report, it would have notified us right away, but thankfully, this didn’t happen to us.
• USPS address change monitoring:We moved apartments while testing Identity Guard, and of course, we had to change our address registered to the USPS. The same day we did, Identity Guard notified us that an address change was filed. If it were a real thief trying to forward our mail (which contains tons of personal information) to their address, we would have been alerted.
• Home title monitoring: If someone opened a home title in our names, or tried to transfer a home title from our names to theirs if we ever had one, Identity Guard would let us know immediately.
• Risk management report: Identity Guard produced a report that showed us how at risk we were for identity fraud.
• Safe browsing tools: Identity Guard even had a browser extension that helped protect our privacy online, fighting against phishing attacks, blocking ads, flash, trackers, and mining.
• Anti-phishing mobile app: Aside from the Identity Guard Classic app, the company offered us the Anti Phishing by Identity Guard mobile app, which detected and blocked phishing websites on Chrome, Dolphin, and Samsung Internet.

One aspect we liked was the detail in every alert we received (see screenshot above). Right after signing up, Identity Guard used the information we provided to do an initial scan and found a data breach where the email entered was involved. It shows where and when the breach happened, where it found the breached information (dark web), and how it could impact us.

That’s not even the best part. Our favorite is the ‘What Should You Do?’ that lists a couple of things you can do to fix the problem. Not everyone knows how to deal with identity theft and data breaches, but even if you do, those suggestions can be helpful.

Insurance and Restoration

Another crucial inclusion in most identity theft protection services, insurance and identity restoration services provide help in case the customer falls victim to identity theft. Like we said from the start, these services don’t eliminate the possibility of identity theft. So if the unfortunate happens, you need contingencies.

Identity Guard’s insurance covers losses up to $1 million. This can be anything from stolen funds to legal and personal expenses as a result of identity theft.

That’s well within the industry standards, but know that there are services that offer better coverage. For example, LifeLock’s top-tier plan covers up to $3 million – $1 million each for stolen funds, legal fees, and personal expenses. McAfee is another standout service, as it offers coverage up to $2 million.

As for identity restoration, you’ll get a dedicated case manager to help you resolve your case if you’re on the Ultra plan. That means they’ll send letters and file disputes to your credit card companies, take care of filing cases, and do other tasks on your behalf. This service doesn’t extend to Value and Total plan users.

Identity Guard Identity Theft Protection Features

Privacy and Security

As everyone could probably tell, privacy plays a big part in identity theft protection. You do your part to protect your privacy, but the company safeguarding your data needs to do their part as well. That’s why aside from testing Identity Guard, we also took a close look at its privacy policy and data security.

When we signed up for an Identity Guard protection plan, we filled in sensitive information about ourselves with the expectation that Identity Guard would protect it from identity thieves. But how about data breaches? Well, Identity Guard uses more than adequate security measures to protect customer data stored on their servers.

For starters, it encrypts all data using “military-grade” encryption, according to its privacy policy. Now, that is a vague description, but in the tech industry, military-grade encryption often means 256-bit AES (because that’s what the U.S. military uses to encrypt sensitive communications). And if that’s the case, nothing is getting past that encryption.

Additionally, Identity Guard makes it clear that it doesn’t share the details you fill in when setting up your protection with third-parties unless absolutely necessary. For example, if you provide Identity Guard complaint information about scam calls you received, they may share it with relevant government agencies such as the FCC and CFPB. However, Identity Guard guarantees that it won’t share your information with advertisers.

Identity Guard, however, does share some types of information with its corporate partners and service providers, but these types of information come from when you visit its website or sign up for a plan. That includes your email address, device information, and IP location — things that other websites you visit already likely collect and share.

User Experience

Identity theft protection services are pretty much a set-and-forget type of service. Once you’re done setting it up with all the information you want to protect, you can just let it be. It will monitor data points and key areas to make sure the information you provided doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

As such, the user experience hinges heavily on the set up process. Identity Guard wasn’t the simplest to set up, but the process was streamlined enough that we could call it user-friendly.

Here’s how it went: First, we filled in our information and bought a subscription. After that, we gained access to our Identity Guard Dashboard, but to fully unlock all features, we had to fill in some more information. This part took the most time as we had to enter our personal details one by one. Identity Guard also had us answer a few multiple-choice questions and a couple of threat-related questions to fine-tune our service.

The more information we gave Identity Guard, the more data they could spit back at us, especially for the AI-powered features like the social insight and risk management reports.

Once we’d input all our information, we navigated between the Dashboard, the alerts, and Watchlist, plus, our credit reports and scores*.

How Much Does Identity Guard Cost?

Identity Guard’s prices are some of the lowest and most flexible we’ve ever seen. Monthly, an individual plan with basic protection costs $8.99, but the individual plans can actually range up to $29.99 as they get more comprehensive. That said, you can sign up for a whole year and save as much as $5 per month. The annual individual plans cost $7.50 to $25 per month, paid once every year.

Besides individual plans, Identity Guard offers family plans, which covers up to five adult individuals and an unlimited number of children. Prices for family plans range from $14.99 to $39.99 if paid monthly, but again, discounts are available for annual plans. Family plans can cost as low as $12.50 to $33.33 per month if paid yearly.

Here’s a breakdown of Identity Guard’s regular prices and features for the three plans available: Value, Total, and Ultra.

Identity Guard offers plans for business and personal use, and within those two categories, individuals and groups. Regardless of which subscription plan we selected, we chose between annual or monthly contracts. We had no trouble finding an Identity Guard plan that worked for us. Identity Guard has a plan for spouses as well, a rarity in the identity monitoring industry.

Identity Guard has three personal plan options for identity theft protection services: Value, Total, and Ultra.

The Ultra plan provided the most coverage whether through the individual plan or the Identity Guard family plan, although it was a reasonable price at either $29.99 per month or $300 per year for an individual. We signed up for a year because we knew we wanted to test out the service, and it includes a 17 percent discount. All plans include a $1 million reimbursement maximum for identity theft, but only the Total and Ultra plans monitor credit scores and reports from all three credit-reporting bureaus.

Unfortunately, Identity Guard doesn’t offer a free trial. However, they do provide a 30-day money-back guarantee, which can work as a trial. Try the software out, and if you aren’t satisfied within those 30 days get your money back. It’s a sort of free trial for Identity Guard, only, it’s not free because you have to pay first.

We appreciated Identity Guard’s 30-day guarantee as a substitute for a free trial. If you’d rather go the try-before-you-buy route, our IdentityIQ review and our LifeLock review are good places to start.

Customer Support

Identity Guard has impressive customer support, whether you’re looking to get more identity theft prevention tips or answers to your account-related questions. Identity Guard publishes several helpful guides and blogs on a monthly basis. Plus, if you’re looking to get more personalized customer support, you can call their phone hotline; it’s available 24/7.

That said, if you have an aversion to making business phone calls like most of us do these days, you have no other option but to send a ticket or send an email. Identity Guard is slower in responding to those. You have to wait for 24 to 48 hours. We sent an email Tuesday morning and got a response Wednesday afternoon.

Additionally, Identity Guard’s email support doesn’t handle concerns that might involve sensitive information such as updating personal details, accounts, and billing. So yeah, you will have to pick up your phone if your concern involves those.