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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 horrifying thing about the whole experience was just knowing that there was someone out there claiming to be my brother, armed with just enough personal and financial data to get into big trouble.

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.

Most companies center their efforts around checking your credit score regularly so no charges can slip past you without you being aware of its presence. There’s nothing complicated about reading your credit report — you could do it too, for much cheaper, I might add. So, not counting this, what exactly do these businesses do?

That question is impossible to answer, which is the most frustrating thing about these protective services. You have to take their word for it and assume you are somehow safer. Obviously, this can cause friction between the customer and the business. Protection against identity theft can only be measured by whether or not your identity has been stolen since beginning the use of their product. If your identity isn’t stolen, that means their efforts helped, right?

Well, not really. You’ll never really know.

What Features?

Pricing for protective services changes heartily from service to service depending on what they claim to do for you. There is no business out in Internet Land who explicitly states what they do and for how much and which ones are premium and which are not. Just about everything — yes, everything — these companies do for you, you can easily do on your own. For free.

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.

Don’t wait any longer, use identity theft prevention techniques to stay safe even when reviewing financials on the web. Do a little digging and get as much info as you can about what products you can buy and how you can have protection against identity theft. Only take serious advice from trusted websites to avoid scams and false claims.