Took a $35 credit monitoring subscription and it caught a fraudulent account within a week

I signed up for one of those credit monitoring services after my friend got hit with identity theft last year. It cost me $35 a month which I thought was a waste at first. Then about 5 days in I got an alert that someone opened a store card at Best Buy using my info in another state. I froze my credit right away and disputed it with the bureaus. The whole thing got sorted in about 2 weeks and I didnt lose any money. Now I tell everyone I know to get one of these services even if it feels like throwing cash away. Has anyone else had a monitoring service save them from something worse?

3 comments

3 Comments

sagejackson3d ago

And that's exactly what I'm talking about @abbyfury, people brush off the alerts because they look like junk mail. I almost did the same thing with that Best Buy alert, thought it was a phishing attempt until I logged into the actual service and saw the store card was opened in some city I've never even visited. The fraudster even changed the billing address to a PO box out there, so the real mail would never reach me. If I'd ignored it for just a few more days, they could have maxed out the card and I'd be stuck fighting collections calls for months.

tessap973d ago

Yeah, I saw a report saying 1 in 5 people ignore those alerts thinking they're junk.

abbyf793d ago

Heard this exact story from my neighbor Karen. She ignored the alerts for two days thinking they were spam, then her bank called asking about a car loan she supposedly took out in Texas.