In this Identity Guard review, I’m going to go over the most important factors to consider when deciding if this long-standing Identity Theft Protection solution is the right choice for keeping you and your family safe online.
I’ve used seven different digital security platforms to lock down my identity and I’ve really grilled them to find out where each of them excels and where they start to fumble—see my Best Identity Theft Protection Service Review for more details.
It feels weird saying it, but I geek out on this stuff. I have my ear to the ground in the world of Identity Theft Protection, so make sure to check out the link to my most current deals and recommendations for you guys.
Identity Guard is a great choice if you just want a stripped down plan at an affordable price. Their dark web monitoring is one of the best out there, and I’ll discuss just how well it performs in just a bit.
But if you want the added benefits of a more comprehensive Identity Theft Protection plan, then rather than climbing up their service tiers you’re probably better off checking out Aura, especially if you want to protect your spouse, your kids, and even your parents.
Fun fact—Aura actually owns Identity Guard, so no matter what you’re looking for, you’re already barking up the right tree.
Now let’s get down to it and see what Identity Guard has to offer for monitoring and fraud resolution, and also if the cost of their plans makes sense for you.
One often overlooked but super important aspect of any Identity Theft Protection company is the quality of their customer support team.
Don’t laugh, and stick with me. There’s a point to be made here.
Most of the companies I’ve worked with are pretty darn good, and Identity Guard is no exception.
Their customer support team is based in the US and in my experience they’re quite knowledgeable—not only of the Identity Guard product and the needs of their customers, but also just general identity safety practices as a whole.
But why do I even care about this?
Because my experiences with the #1 most recognized brand in Identity Theft Protection have been remarkably headache-inducing. When you call in need of their help, you’re greeted with agents in call centers who seem to be reading replies off of scripts.
Rather than feeling like they have your back, I get the impression that they’re simply documenting your calls and assuring you that your plans include insurance.
Maybe it’s not always quite that bad, but I’d prefer to be working with a support team I can count on when the day comes that some identity thieves intercept my mortgage check.
And luckily with Identity Guard, I’m confident that they’ll be there for me in times of extreme stress. In fact, it seems like they have the same support team as Aura. Since I use both companies, when I call up Identity Guard they can actually see my Aura account. It’s led to some confusion. But in a good way.
Setting Up Identity Guard
So how Identity Guard works is that you input the information you want monitored—things like your name, email addresses, gamer tags – there are quite a few options. Identity Guard will then perform scans on an ongoing basis and notify you if they find anything of interest.
Immediately upon signing up they submit opt-out request with data brokers on your behalf—for me it was 30 of them right off the bat. This helps cut down on junk mail, email spam, robocalls, those kinds of things.
And they actually do this on an ongoing basis, every now and then I get an email from them letting me know that they submitted opt out requests with, you know, 5 data brokers—however many it may be.
And this is a nice touch, the only other company I’ve seen do this is Aura.
They also monitor your credit records so that you’ll get an alert of any inquiries from lenders—which may just be normal, but they could also be indicative of someone trying to open a line of credit in your name like a credit card or a car loan.
We’ll talk a bit more about their full credit monitoring offerings in a minute.
And similarly with Utility Accounts you’ll get an alert if any new accounts are opened in your name—things like electric service or things like that.
Of course the thing that everyone is most interested in is their dark web monitoring, and Identity Guard will scan the dark web and send you an alert if they come across your personal information.
Typically this would be available as the result of a security breach at a website you’ve made an account with, but there can be other sources too.
Identity Guard will let you know what information they found on the dark web, where they found it, and they’ll typically provide you with some suggested actions to take in response. Of course, you can call their support team if it is anything of particular concern.
And so that you can get an idea of how well their dark web monitoring performs, I’ll show you what Identity Guard finds for my personal information on the dark web later.
But first there are a few more aspects of personal information monitoring that I want to go over with you guys.
And to kick that off I’ll come back to credit monitoring so I’m not leaving you hanging there.
Features of Identity Guard
Credit Monitoring and Reports
While Identity Guard’s Value plan offers nothing more than 1-bureau credit monitoring, you can unlock 3-bureau credit monitoring—that is, from Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax—as well as monthly credit scores on their upgraded plans.
And with their top-tier Ultra plan, you can also get annual credit reports from all three bureaus and even an Experian Credit Lock which prevents unwanted inquiries into your credit file with the click of a button.
For comparison, you get all of this standard on Aura’s plans—no need to upgrade. Plus, with Aura you’re getting monthly credit scores from all three bureaus, whereas you’re only getting the Equifax credit score with Identity Guard.
Public Record Alerts
And similarly, you’ll need to upgrade to Identity Guard’s Ultra plan if you want public record alerts like Home Title Monitoring in case someone tries to add their name to your home deed, Criminal and Sex Offense monitoring in case someone puts your name down during an arrest, and USPS address change monitoring in case someone tries to reroute your mail.
That said, these modules appear to be active in my Identity Guard account even though I’m on the value plan. I don’t have any hits though, so I can’t confirm that they’re working. My guess is they probably aren’t.
Transaction Monitoring
Then there’s transaction monitoring, which is spread across Identity Guard’s upgraded plans. You can link bank accounts, credit and debit cards, and investment accounts so you can monitor your financial activity all in one place.
You can even set alert thresholds so if it turns out Melissa McCarthy is going on shopping sprees and downing champagne in a bubble bath on your dime, you’ll get a notification so that you can take action immediately.
Social Media Monitoring
And of course there are a few other perks you can enjoy with Identity Guard. On their top-tier Ultra plan you can also enjoy social media monitoring so if someone takes over your accounts and starts posting inappropriate content, you’ll get an alert for that.
Safe Browsing and Password Manager
And while Identity Guard says that all plans include safe browsing and a password manager, only the password manager shows up on my account with the Value plan—the Antivirus and VPN say they’re not included. So that’s something to look into further if your particularly interested, although I think you can find better solutions elsewhere.
I use different platforms for these, so I haven’t looked into it further.
And before we bring it all home with fraud resolution, let’s check out the most fun part of monitoring—the dark web alerts.
Dark Web Monitoring
Whenever I set up personal information monitoring with the seven Identity Theft Protection companies I use, I always input the same personal information as long as it’s allowed.
And Identity Guard allows me to monitor all of my email addresses, and more, so they’re looking at everything.
Some companies have somewhat limiting restrictions on the number of email addresses you can monitor, like LifeLock and CompleteID only allow you to monitor 5 and 4 email addresses, respectively. That’s not quite enough for me
So when that happens, I make sure to leave out email addresses that turn up no dark web alerts from companies—like Identity Guard—that allow me to monitor all of my accounts.
I do my best to keep everything fair despite the limitations from some of the other companies.
Identity Guard’s dark web monitoring turns up a total of 18 dark web alerts for my personal information, and of those 18, 9 of them are unique.
The unique hits include one of my gmail logins, which is no good. But at least now I know how people were getting into all my different accounts a few years back—they were all tied to that gmail in one way or another.
I obviously changed the password for that reason, but it’s good to know where it all started.
Other unique hits come from breaches at websites you probably know like Adobe, Dropbox, and MySpace. Yes, I did have a MySpace account—and even one for my first band. I think the second band I was in had one too, but I didn’t make that account.
More hits come from Ticketfly, Canva, Twitter, and a couple of smaller websites called Indaba Music and Chegg that most people probably haven’t heard of.
And then all of those non-unique hits are from breach compilations, which is when someone puts loads of people’s login credentials in a nice, convenient package on the dark web to help out their fellow internet pirates—Identity Thieves included.
How does Identity Guard compare to other Identity Theft Protection Solutions?
Dark Web Monitoring
Well, before I tell you I just want to mention that there’s no perfect crossover from company to company. One platform is always finding some hits that another isn’t.
But what’s really clear is that some companies have poor dark web monitoring, while others are pretty freakin’ thorough.
For example, IdentityIQ turns up no dark web alerts whatsoever. None.
Norton’s LifeLock turns up a total of 8 dark web alerts, and although they’re all unique, LifeLock’s not even finding my leaked gmail credentials. Like, seriously?
Aura turns up the exact same dark web alerts as Identity Guard, so 18 total and 9 unique hits.
So I guess I wasn’t super precise with my comment earlier about no perfect crossover, but that’s because Aura and Identity Guard are using the exact same technology to scan the dark web.
And the only one that does better than Identity Guard and Aura is IdentityForce, but much like Identity Guard, IdentityForce has a lot of it’s benefits locked up in a tiered structure, and they don’t offer they great stripped-down value plan like Identity Guard.
Regardless, Identity Guard’s dark web monitoring is really top notch, which is why I think their Value plan is such a great deal.
Threat Resolution
But then of course we have to talk about fraud resolution. And while I’ve already told you Identity Guard’s customer support team is fantastic, there are a few shortcomings here.
Most importantly, you don’t get white-glove fraud resolution with Identity Guard unless you upgrade to their top-tier Ultra plan. So in the event that you’re a victim of Identity Theft I’m sure their customer support will point you in the right direction, but it’s gonna be up to you to do the legwork.
And that can take hours and hours of your time, and you’re not going to be in the best mindset as you’re working through it.
Identity Theft Insurance
And while you can cover up to 5 adults and unlimited children on IdentityGuard’s family plans, the Identity Theft Insurance is capped at $1M. That’s totally standard, and nothing against them specifically for that, but with Aura you get up to $1M in identity theft insurance per adult, which is up to $5M on their family plan.
Aura also includes that white glove fraud resolution, and all the other benefits they have to offer, on all their plans
Conclusion
So I think if you just want great dark web monitoring at an affordable price, then Identity Guard is a good way to go. As of writing it’s only $7.50/month for an individual billed annually, or $8.99 billed mon thly.
But if you upgrade to the mid tier Total plan it’s $16.67/mo for an individual billed annually, or $19.99/mo billed monthly at the time of writing. That’s already more expensive than Aura, and you haven’t even unlocked all the benefits yet.
And that’s before you’ve applied my discounts. Remember to check out my links for the latest deals and recommendations
If you want to learn more you can check out my comparison of Aura and Identity Guard.
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