ID Theft Protection Service Launches

MyTruston is launching a useful new online service for preventing and recovering from ID theft.

The easy-to-use site, MyTruston.com, acts as a guide to walk you through what needs to be done to keep up with what's happening with your credit report or to recover from credit card fraud or other ID theft. The prevention service is free, and guides you through getting a free copy of your credit report and looking for anything suspicious.

The recovery service is $20 per month and has steps for dealing with credit and debit card problems, or phone and utility bill issues. According to Tom Fragala, MyTruston's founder, you can pay for the recovery service when you need it and then downgrade back to the free monitoring service when it's all settled.

You only need to provide your e-mail address (and nothing else) to use the service. There are clear and simple instructions for each step, and you can save notes for each task. You also record the date you performed each task, which both gives you a record and allows the site to take care of scheduling (such as sending you a notice along the lines of "you should have received a response from Experian by now").

The site acts as a guide more than a service; nobody makes any calls or fills out any forms for you. It's a nice guide, though. You can currently get e-mail support; online chat and a toll free phone support number are on the way.

The whole process for signing up for the prevention service and running through it start to finish took me about 10 minutes total, and I finished with a copy of my credit report from Experian. In 4 months I should be getting an e-mail reminder to request another report from another credit bureau.

For more information and resources on ID theft, you can also head to the non-profit Identity Theft Resource Center.

(Edited 2/26 per company's comments - online chat isn't yet available)

Comments

Erik,

Thanks for the article.

I want to let your readers know that the new release of MyTruston will be available on our launch date, this Monday Feb 26th. In the interim, they will find the beta version of the service (release 2.0), which works OK and is totally free. (If it's 100% ready, we will push out the new release earlier).

Also, I miscommunicated on one point. Our online chat support will not be ready at launch, but we hope to have it in place in the near future. Sorry about that. In the meantime, send an email to help@mytruston.com or click on the "feedback" link in the top right corner of every page.

Thanks,
Tom
CEO, Truston

tfragala

February 23, 2007

5:39 PM PT