April 14,2009
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Protection w/o a Rip-off, Pt.1
Monitoring the monitoring.Many credit card consumers today are enlisting the services if ID theft companies without really knowing what they're getting until down the road. Some are satisfied and relieved while others feel ripped off. Today the most common cases of ID fraud usually involve credit cards. TV commercials, e-mail and web advertising have inundated us with their offers. Free trials and other perks entice us to try them out (with the sinister little asterisks at the end). So, here is some input on the findings of various experts and compiled statistics of credit card consumer experiences:
Monitoring your credit: This kind of service is the easiest to administer. These businesses make use of all the same techniques that credit card lending institutions use and kind of parallel these efforts. The biggest difference is in how much work they actually put into it. Some are aggressive like : "Debix", "ID Theft Assist" and "ID Watchdog" and yield good results. Other companies, however, use simplistic techniques and don't work very hard. They perform fewer periodic checks and aren't thorough to check all three major credit reporting bureaus. Their response to credit card threats is not as immediate either.
Keep in mind here, that there is no such thing as absolutely foolproof but, some services outperform the others significantly. Also, remember that this is not fraud prevention, only detection. Neither does is it protect the consumer from other types of ID fraud, only credit cards and similar credit situations. Still, there is some peace of mind just knowing that someone is watching out for you.
Speaking of that, it's also helpful to remember that the credit card lending banks are constantly monitoring the accounts of their consumer clients with very sophisticated algorithms to spot anomalies like charges arising from unusually places and spending habits that are radically different from historic patterns of a person's account.