Identity Guard ID Theft Protection Review

Features

Identity Guard and services like it are designed to catch telltale signs of identity theft so you can quickly react and mitigate or prevent damage. Identity Guard does that by monitoring credit accounts, financial accounts, the dark web, and news reports, and other areas where signs of your identity being stolen could pop up.

We signed up for Identity Guard’s top plan, Ultra. It comes with credit monitoring and identity theft protection services. Our plan checks for fraudulent home title transfers, scans social media for fake accounts, and locks our credit via Experian with one click. If we’re exposed, Identity Guard offers $1 million in identity theft insurance.

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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.

During our testing, we applied for a student loan, which was flagged by Identity Guard through one of the major credit bureaus. If you’re concerned about an individual line of credit, you can use Identity Guard to activate a fraud alert. Keep in mind that credit and debit monitoring are only available on the Ultra plan.

Unfortunately, the lowest-tier plan doesn’t include credit monitoring. As you can see in our LifeLock cost assessment, they offer one-bureau credit monitoring for the same price as Identity Guard’s Value plan. However, once you get up to the mid-tier plans, Identity Guard offers three-bureau credit monitoring, whereas LifeLock still only offers one-bureau monitoring. Learn more in our LifeLock and Identity Guard comparison.

Financial Monitoring

Identity thieves go beyond attacking your credit score and attempt to access your bank accounts and credit cards. They even try to get a hold of investments and 401Ks. Identity Guard displays all the personally identifiable information that banks use when opening new accounts. This is helpful if a thief attempts to steal your information or sign up for new services in your name.

Once again, the Value plan offers limited coverage for high-risk transactions. The middle-tier plan expands financial monitoring to include bank accounts. Our Ultra plan was the only one that provided comprehensive coverage, including monitoring credit cards, investment accounts, and retirement accounts.

Identity Protection

We added all the information we wanted monitored to our Identity Guard account. This included our name, address, birth date, and Social Security Number. Identity Guard did an initial scan of the internet and dark web, and thankfully didn’t find anything. It will continue monitoring 24/7 and alert us if our details show up.

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.

Identity Guard even provides tips on how to fix the problem. There’s a section titled “What Should You Do?” with a list of steps you can take to reduce the impacts. If it’s your first time dealing with identity theft or data breaches, these tips are invaluable and save you Googling for suggestions.

Insurance and Restoration

Like we said from the start, no identity protection service can truly prevent identity theft. That’s why insurance and identity restoration should be included in all identity protection packages.

Identity Guard offers to reimburse up to $1 million in losses to customers who suffer an identity theft. Those losses could include stolen funds, legal fees, and personal expenses. While $1 million identity theft protection sounds like a lot, it’s actually the industry standard. There are some plans from companies like LifeLock and McAfee that offer more, up to $3 million in the case of LifeLock.

If you’re on the Ultra plan, Identity Guard will also assign you a dedicated case manager to resolve the case. They’ll send letters and file disputes to your credit card companies on your behalf. This service is a time-saver and another reason to consider upgrading to the Ultra plan.

Identity Guard Identity Theft Protection Features

Privacy and Security

When we were signing up for Identity Guard, we were thinking, “Boy, they are collecting a lot of our sensitive, personal information.” That got us thinking about the famous quote from bank robber Willie Sutton, who said he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.” The idea that Identity Guard keeps our personal information is a big reason why we took a close look at the company’s data security and privacy policies.

As for guarding against data breaches, Identity Guard uses robust security measures to your data stored on its servers. It encrypts all data using “military-grade” 256-bit AES bit encryption.Also, Identity Guard doesn’t share any information with third-parties unless absolutely necessary. For example, if you receive a scam call, Identity Guard may share your phone number with relevant government agencies such as the FCC and CFPB.

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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 offers a significant discount for the first year of a subscription if you pay all of it upfront. Monthly, an individual plan with basic protection costs $8.99, but the upper plans can actually range up to $29.99 per month as they get more comprehensive. That said, you can sign up for your first year and save as much as $5 per month. The first-year individual plans, paid all upfront, average out to between $7.50 and $25 per month.

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 first-year plans, as low as $12.50 to $33.33 per month if the year is paid upfront.

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.

There are three Identity Guard plans to choose from – Value, Total, and Ultra. We chose the Ultra plan as it has the most coverage and was only $29.99 per month or $25 per month when paid annually for individuals. For families, it’s $39.99 per month or $33.33 per month when you pay for a year upfront.

All plans come with $1 million in identity theft insurance, so you don’t need to pay for the most expensive subscription for this protection. But you will need the Total or Ultra plan for bank account monitoring, three-bureau credit monitoring, and a monthly credit score check.

Identity Guard doesn’t offer free trials like Aura does, but it comes with a 60-day money-back guarantee. We think this is a good timeframe to test out the data removal service and all the monitoring features. If you prefer a free trial, we recommend checking out our IdentityIQ review and LifeLock review to see if they are a better fit.

Customer Support

Identity Guard has an excellent library of content on its website that can answer most account-related questions. The site also features identity theft prevention tips everyone should follow. If you still need help, you can call Identity Guard 24/7.

You can also submit a ticket or send an email, but we didn’t have a great experience using these methods. We sent an email Tuesday morning and didn’t get a response until Wednesday afternoon. On average, we found the wait time to be 24 to 48 hours, so we think you’re better off calling Identity Guard directly.