![]() To understand how this is helpful, first you have to understand what VantageScore is. To learn more about how to do that, we suggest visiting each bureaus’ websites.Īll right, moving on from the credit lock feature, the next box down on the dashboard was our VantageScore tracking. We recommend everyone keep their credit files locked or frozen. Now here’s the important part: This is the most effective thing you can do as an average person to prevent identity theft and fraud. Locks - like the one offered by ProtectMyID - are able to be toggled on and off in real-time, while freezes take a little more effort to set up and undo. They prevent unauthorized individuals from applying for lines of credit or loans using your credit files by blocking all activity associated with them. The first thing that popped up was a huge banner welcoming us, and asking us to complete our profile to get the most out of the service.īoth locks and freezes essentially accomplish the same thing. Once we skipped that step, we landed on our dashboard. 3 If you’re interested in identity theft protection for your entire family, read our guide on the best identity theft protection services for children. What’s worse, fraud committed in children’s names often goes undetected for years. Although they don’t have established credit histories or financial information of their own, children are viewed by identity thieves as blank slates. We don’t have any little ones of our own, but for those that do, this is an important option to consider. Included in our plan we could monitor up to 10 for no additional cost. You never know which pieces of your information a fraudster is using to build a fake persona that could decimate you financially.Īfter that was done, we were asked if we wanted to enroll any children in our protections. It’s a tedious process, but like we said, you should enter everything you have to make the most of your protections. That said, we went ahead and found our passport and entered all of our information. Just make sure you’re not using common words or phrases. Luckily, ProtectMyID’s minimum requirements will force you to create a fairly secure password, which we really liked seeing. Ideally, you’ll use a password manager to generate something completely unique and random. Do not use anything identifiable like children’s birthdays or the name of the service the password is for. ![]() First, your password needs to be at least 8 characters long and include capital and lowercase letters as well as numbers and special punctuation. Now, if you’ll let us hop up on our soapbox here for a second, we’d like to say a little something about passwords. We were also asked to enter our email address, create a password, and select a security question and response. This was simple enough - we just had to enter our personal information like our name, our address, our date of birth, and our social security number. So keep in mind that if you decide to go annual, you’ll save a little over $30 per year on the Platinum plan. Finally, we were asked if we wanted to be billed on a monthly or an annual cycle. We were asked to enter our AAA membership number as well as our home zip code to confirm our selection, then we had to do one of those “select all the pictures with trees” verification tests. If you’re a AAA member and not interested in spending any extra money on identity theft protection, though, we’d still recommend signing up for the free Essential plan - it’s certainly better than nothing. We chose the Platinum plan for the purposes of this review so that we could get into all the bells and whistles, but the Deluxe Plan also offers pretty solid protections. As you can see, there are a ton of exciting services offered here.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |