Aura Identity Theft Protection Review 2024

Our Methodology

When we research our product or service, our process starts with thorough research. We examine company claims and user reviews to get a sense of the pros and cons. This helps us to focus our testing so we can debunk false claims and back up strong claims with personal experience.

Then, we purchase the product or service and put it through its paces. With Aura, we scanned the Internet for our personal information, tested credit locks, and more. We really try to test the service to ensure that it works as advertised. This is critically important because there’s a lot on the line when it comes to protecting your identity. We also try to live with a product or service on a day-to-day basis to see if it’s intrusive or difficult to use.

Finally, we compare prices with the competition. Is Aura charging a fair price based on what we saw and experienced? How does it compare to other identity theft services from LifeLock and Identity Guard? These price comparisons help us make our final recommendations and consider a product or service like Aura for one of our ‘best of’ lists.

Now let’s get down to it.

Purchasing and Setting Up Aura Identity Theft Protection

Purchasing and getting started with Aura takes all of 10 minutes. You’ll be asked which service package you’re interested in before entering your personal information to get your account set up. Here’s a quick breakdown of the different plans and prices for reference:

I have more information in my guide to Aura’s pricing, but just to give you an overview, all plans offer the same core features. It’s not a tiered service. Unlike LifeLock and Identity Guard that let you choose the level of protection you want, you’re either in or out with Aura. If you’re in, you’ll get all the features no matter which plan you go with.

The only exception to that is the Family plan. It includes additional features such as parental controls, safe gaming for Windows, screen time limiting, and online history and usage reports. You won’t get any of those with the Individual and Couple plans, but we’d argue that those features aren’t really needed for those plans. Those are features you need if you have kids you want to protect as well. And besides, if you want those features, you can buy them as an add-on in the form of the Kids plan.

Once you’ve got your account set up, you’ll be asked to answer a few questions that will help tailor the service to your needs.

Activating each individual service took the longest. It wasn’t as simple as toggling on each feature either. Some required additional information from me, while others even required me to digitally sign some forms. It wasn’t as straightforward as I expected, but it had to be done. The more time and effort you put into enabling each feature, the better Aura is poised to protect your identity. After all, most of it is one-and-done – you set them up once and they’ll continue to work for as long as your subscription is active. Or until you need to update your information.

With that being said, I recommend setting aside at least 30 minutes to set up Aura. It could take way longer depending on how much information you have to protect. I also suggest keeping all your devices – your smartphones, tablets, laptops, and PCs – within reach, as you will have to activate the cybersecurity features on each. For example, I had to set up the password manager on every desktop browser I use.

Aura Identity Theft Protection — An Overview

Every second counts when it comes to identity theft. The longer fraudsters go unnoticed, the more damage they can do. That’s why I was pretty interested to read that Aura was part of a third-party study that revealed it detected the most credit inquiries and delivered alerts up to 250 times faster than its competitors. What that means is that Aura isn’t just looking for signs of identity theft; it’s doing so faster than the competition, giving its users a better chance to prevent damage.

Aura doesn’t stop there, though. They offer a whole bevy of features to help protect you and your family online. Here’s a quick rundown of what their individual plan includes:

• Identity theft protection
• $1M identity theft insurance
• Triple-bureau credit monitoring
• Instant credit lock
• Home and auto title monitoring
• Financial transactions alerts
• Antivirus software
• VPN
• Password manager
• People search sites and spam list removal
• Fraud remediation services

And all of this for just $12 bucks a month? Sounds a little too good to be true, but hey, you never know until you’ve tried it, right? So now let’s proceed to the testing part of this review. After setting up Aura and looking at what it offers, I went ahead and tested how it performs in the real world.

Putting Aura to the Test

Aura offers a lot of features, so let’s do this methodically. Let’s start with their flagship service: their identity theft protection.

Identity Theft Protection

Simply put, Aura’s identity theft protections are some of the best in the market today. They offer account breach monitoring, Social Security number monitoring, criminal and court records monitoring, and even home and auto title monitoring — yes, some fraudsters have been able to steal people’s homes or at least titles to use as collateral for loans.

So does it work? I’d say so. When I first set up my account, there were 22 critical alerts I had to address. Mostly, these were just stemming from old data breaches, but I was happy Aura was able to pick up on them so quickly.

And for context, here’s everything I tested out under Aura’s identity theft protection umbrella:

• Personal information and ID monitoring: I definitely don’t want my personally identifiable information floating around the internet. Aura notified me if this registered information fell into the wrong hands.
• Social Security and ID authentication monitoring: Aura monitored the internet to see if anyone used my Social Security numbers or conducted a transaction with my identity.
• Online account monitoring: Aura was the first to know of any breaches to my online accounts or passwords. If you don’t want that happening to you, here are some tips for creating a strong password.
• Home title and address monitoring:Aura ensured no one stole my identity by forwarding my mail or used my home title to get a collateral loan.
• Auto title monitoring: Similar to home title monitoring, Aura can secure your car ownership title with this feature. Additionally, Aura has partnered with auto dealers nationwide. Partner dealers can extend free one-year Aura memberships to customers, with an option to extend the service past the one-year mark for as low as $5 per month. Just something to keep in mind.
• Criminal and court records monitoring: Did you know individuals charged with crimes can use your name to impersonate you? Yikes! The good news is that Aura would notify me if my information turned up in criminal or court records. The good news is that this definitely didn’t happen during my test period.

Now keep in mind, these protections are reactive — not preventative. That means when it comes to identity theft, Aura isn’t going to stop someone from stealing your identity, but will let you know if someone is trying to do so. That way, you can take the necessary steps to thwart them and avoid bigger damages.

As part of its reactive nature, Aura also offers insurance. If it’s too late and the thieves have already done some damage, you can use the insurance to recover eligible losses such as stolen funds, legal fees, and personal expenses. The coverage is $1 million per adult member – the industry standard. There are services such as LifeLock that can cover up to $3 million, but I read Aura’s fine print and it’s one of the more generous policies I’ve seen. It even covers lost wage, CPA costs, child care, and more.

Fraud Protection

The next part of Aura’s service is credit and fraud protection, which again, takes a reactive approach. This time, Aura protects users from the consequences of credit fraud by monitoring credit accounts with the three major bureaus.

I want to highlight that three-bureau credit monitoring is a premium feature in the industry. When I looked at Identity Guard’s subscription plans, I learned that the cheapest option doesn’t include credit monitoring, much less three-bureau monitoring. That’s reserved for mid-tier and top-tier plans that start at $16.67 monthly. So getting three-bureau credit monitoring from Aura’s $12 plan is special.

On top of that, Aura helps prevent financial loss by keeping track of personal finances from bank accounts to investment accounts. Credit protection covers a wide scope, but these were the highlights of my tests.

• Credit monitoring: Aura alerted me to new inquiries on my credit file, like new credit cards or bank loans, across the three major bureaus — Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. Aura says it sends fraud alerts up to four times faster than its competition, and based on my experience, I’d believe it.
• Monthly credit score updates: During my test period, I received monthly updates on our VantageScore credit score, which helped me keep track of my creditworthiness and spot inconsistencies. Keep in mind, if your score drops without you taking out new loans or missing payments, that could indicate someone’s using your credit file. I figured monthly score updates from Aura were fine, but see my list of the best credit protection services if that’s a priority for you. It’s possible to receive updates weekly.
• Credit lock: Locking your credit file is a great way to prevent credit fraud, and Aura helped me do it easily. There’s only one caveat: Aura was able to lock my Experian credit file but not my TransUnion and Equifax files. If someone applied for a fraudulent loan in my name and the lender pulled my credit file from someone other than Experian, the lock would have been useless. I definitely recommend locking your credit file with TransUnion and Equifax separately, even if you have the Experian credit lock from Aura.
• Financial fraud monitoring: I linked our financial accounts, including credit cards, bank accounts and investment accounts, and set alerts for unusual spending activity. Remember, stopping financial fraud is a race against time. The sooner you can report unusual activity, the sooner you can put a stop to unauthorized spending.
• Annual credit report: Finally, I was able to retrieve a copy of my credit reports from the three reporting bureaus, thanks to Aura. It’s worth noting, though, that getting credit reports is free, regardless of whether you’re an Aura user. Check out my guide on how to get a free copy of your credit report for more information.

Now it’s a little difficult to “test” fraud protections. I don’t want to plaster my personal information all over the dark web to see who’d bite. But what I can tell you from my tests: Aura’s fraud protections are sound. They’re comparable to another one of my favorite services, LifeLock, which is definitely saying something. For more information on that, you can read my side-by-side Aura vs. LifeLock comparison.

Device and Network Protection

Most of the identity and credit protection features involve reactive monitoring; however, with device and network protection, Aura becomes proactive. This means it can actually protect your personal information from getting stolen in the first place rather than just alert you after the fact. Here’s what you’ll get:

• Antivirus: Did you know that there are over 677 million known malware programs, and over 350,000 are discovered each day? Scary stuff. What’s more, some types of malware are designed specifically to steal sensitive information, like account passwords and personal files. Thankfully, Aura’s antivirus protection can scan, detect and isolate threats for removal. This wasn’t necessary during my testing period, but I was happy it had this functionality running in the background.
• VPN: Aura’s VPN protected our internet connection with military-grade encryption to hide our activity from cybercriminals. And if you’re thinking, “What does an identity protection brand know about VPNs,” well, Aura actually owns a number of VPN services, like the Hotspot Shield VPN we tested. Protecting your identity is all about staying private, and with a VPN, you can hide your browsing activity, encrypt your traffic and stay anonymous.
• Safe Browsing: Visiting malicious websites is another leading cause of online identity theft, and with the Safe Browsing extension, Aura prevents you from entering questionable sites that could endanger your identity. Some of the sites Aura blocked for us were phishing sites, which are sites known to contain malware.
• Password manager: Our online accounts contain sensitive details, from personal information to payment specifics. Aura locks those up by generating strong passwords and securely storing passwords using encryption. Aura’s password manager worked across all our devices, from desktops and laptops to tablets and smartphones.
• Smart Vault: In addition to a password manager, Aura offers Smart Vault, an encrypted file storage that lets you store sensitive and important files and share them with your trusted contacts. Each adult member of all Aura plans gets 1 GB of secure storage. We used ours to store sensitive work files and digital copies of important paperwork.
• Anti-Track and ad blocker: Websites use trackers to see what you’re up to online — the websites you visit, items you purchase, shows you watch and more — and use the information they gather to profile you. While they generally don’t get personal information from trackers, it’s a good idea to block those to prevent them from being used to target you with ads.
• Email alias: Data breaches have been a problem for the past few years. To help keep your email address from being included in databases of scammers, Aura can generate an email alias for you to hide your real email address and protect it from such breaches. This is similar to Surfshark’s Alternative ID feature, which we tested when we got a Surfshark One subscription.

So these are a lot of digital protections all packaged in one place. That got me thinking: Might I be better protected by doing everything piecemeal? The long and short of that, though, is a resounding … maybe. Here’s why:

Let’s face it. The vast majority of folks aren’t going to hunt down the best antivirus software out there and see which is the best VPN to leverage with it. We’re all looking for convenience in our day-to-day life, and Aura understands that. By packaging together adequate services like their antivirus and VPN and coupling them with identity theft protection for a really affordable price, they’re offering a service to protect most people in ways they never would on their own.

Was their antivirus software the most powerful I’ve ever tested? No. Was their VPN the fastest? Also no. Did either of these come with the bells and whistles I saw when I reviewed NordVPN or put TotalAV to the test? Nope. But am I faulting Aura for that? Not at all. The supplemental protections they offer are just that — supplements. They’re a convenient one-stop shop to get entry-level protections to cover a huge swath of threats. That’s a major benefit in my book.

Now that we’ve talked about the benefits of everything Aura offers, let’s take a look at some of the stuff I didn’t necessarily like.

The Drawbacks of Using Aura

One of the primary drawbacks of using Aura is that while it’s easy to set up, it’s a little difficult to navigate. Now to be fair, a certain level of confusion can be expected, especially when you’re dealing with a provider that offers a list of services as long as your arm. That said, I do think a little more care could have been taken in the design of the desktop. Although it is powerful, it’s not exactly intuitive. If you’re looking for a service that’s a little easier to parse out, you might want to read my review of Identity Guard.

Honestly, that’s my biggest gripe with Aura. But when all was said and done and after about an hour or two of working with it, I started to pick up on the logic of how it was designed. You’re likely going to be working with your identity theft protection service for the long haul, so you’re going to have plenty of time to get familiar with the layout. Ultimately, I think this one’s forgivable.

The other disappointment, I’d say, is what I touched on above. The supplemental features don’t feel as well-rounded as they could have. For example, I couldn’t select the server I wanted to connect through on the VPN, and how the antivirus software was working was a little inscrutable. Again, this is a forgivable offense in my opinion — these services aren’t marketed as being world-class; they perform the function they’re meant to, and that’s all. Still, I think they could be beefed up just a bit. If you’re looking for something fancier or more powerful, you’re going to have to go with an individualized service at the moment.

I think that about covers everything Aura has to offer. Now let’s get down to my recommendation.

Is Aura Worth It?

In my opinion, Aura is a great option for anyone looking for comprehensive digital security and identity theft protection.