Which Programs Offered For Protection Against Identity Theft Work?
Someone stole my brother’s identity ten years ago. In a week, he was hit with four $300 charges, and the bank wasn’t too happy with him. After a few days they finally sided with him and cancelled those charges from ravaging his credit and gave him new bank account information.
The really scary thing about this whole experience is that someone out there in the real world was walking around, claiming to be my brother, and because he or she had just enough personal and financial information to get by, no one could prove this stranger to be otherwise.
My brother reached out and handled his problems himself, despite the fact that his credit still gets hammered by fake charges once in a while. No question, my brother was lucky.
Identity theft is a frightening thing. No one likes the idea of losing money or spending hour after frustrating hour tracking down mysterious charges on their credit reports. When people get scared, they start to do things they wouldn’t normally do, and some businesses begin offering services that offer to help their concerns. Identity theft has definitely freaked out enough people, and numerous businesses offer protective services for a fee.
No Ability To Track Effectiveness
Protection against identity theft is not customer friendly; there is no possible way for customers to see how effective these service providers really are, or if they are improving computer security at all.
The main appeal is their systematic checking of your credit scores so nothing odd comes through your account without you being aware of it. That’s not particularly special, though; anyone can check their credit report. So beyond this, what exactly do these businesses do?
This is an impossible question, and one that plagues every customer who is blindly shoveling money away in the hope that somehow this will keep the identity theft demons away. With no way to track their activities, you have to accept their claims and assume you are safer by some means. Since protection against identity theft can solely be measured by whether or not an identity has been stolen, if your identity hasn’t been stolen, your service provider must have helped, yeah?
No, actually. There’s no way you’ll ever know.
Zero Features For Lots Of Money
The price of protection against identity theft can vary greatly with the number of features each program claims to offer. Not one company out there right now discloses exactly what features and services they provide in an explicit manner, which ones are premium and what comes in the package. Almost everything these companies will do for you, you can do for yourself.
Identity theft is certainly scary, and protection is important, but doing racking up bills through a third party company doesn’t equate to safety and security.
