ID Theft Prevention Goes Proactive

IdentityTruth is offering a free ID theft assessment along with 90 days of ID monitoring leading up to the final release of its ID theft early warning system in mid-August. The free trial only requires your name, current address, phone number, and date of birth.

With these key pieces of information IdentityTruth claims to be able to judge whether your identification is at risk of being stolen. To try out the service for free just go to the registration page and type in the promotional code idtruthbeta777. The service does prompts you to divulge more about yourself, but doesn't require it. By sharing more information, IdentityTruth states, it can better assess your risks.

Steven Domenikos, CEO of IdentityTruth, says the service uses your name, date of birth, phone number, and street address a looks for suspicious activity related to these data points such as a change of physical address, a new phone number, or a utility account opened in your name.

According to Domenikos two thirds of identity thefts are associated with unauthorized change of addresses. "Credit monitoring services do not prevent your identity from being stolen before it happens," Domenikos says. His service can, he claims.

The free 90 days of service also includes e-mail alerts when companies that are likely associated with you suffer data breaches. For example, I live in Boston. So theoretically IdentityTruth would alert me to any local company that had data breach where customer data (possibly even mine) was stolen.

Lastly the service offers guidance of what to do if your identity is stolen or is at "high risk" of being swiped.

After 90 days the free trial goes dormant and IdentityTruth stops actively scanning for suspicious activity associated with your profile. The service will cost $10 a month when it goes live in mid-August. Paid IdentityTruth customers will also receive credit monitoring on par with what companies such as Equifax and Experian offer.

First Impression

I signed up for the service and was a bit confused by IdentityTruth's Risk Report it generated for me. It found an old phone number of mine that was re-assigned to someone else. For this reason I scored a "high" Risk Report score. Its only suggested remedy was to request a copy of my credit report.

Overall, based on the data I shared with IdentityTruth, I scored 49 where 100 is the best possible score. Not clear or explained to me is why I scored so poorly. With other risk factors such as possible credit card and loan fraud I scored a very low risk factor.

Based on my limited exposure to using the service I'm left with a hunger for a better explanation as to why I scored as low as I did. I'm would've liked better and more suggestions on how to look into risks. For example, instead of telling me to pull my credit report to see if anything fishy is going on with my old phone number (that I parted with nearly five years ago) why not suggest calling the phone company to inquire if the number is associated with me?

I also came up against a technical glitch. To get better ID threat assessment you are encouraged to divulge more about myself. When I tried to input my social security number the Web form wouldn't accept anything I typed. Each time I put my cursor inside the social security number form field and started to punch in my number, nothing appeared in the form field. I gave up.

IdentityTruth sounds like an interesting service with loads of potential. We need reasonably priced and comprehensive ID theft prevention services that do more than tell you after the fact you're ID has been stolen. Fraud alerts, credit monitoring, credit remediation services don't seem to be doing enough to nip this ID theft problem at the bud.

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