ID Watchdog Review

Video Review

See ID Watchdog in action as our chief editor Gabe Turner tests out the service on our YouTube channel.

ID Watchdog Identity Theft Protection Features

Using ID Watchdog

ID Watchdog’s website was easy to navigate and made signing up for an account and selecting a subscription a breeze. Once we made our secure payment and entered our personal information, we set up two-factor authentication for our account by answering a few simple questions, such as the month of our mother’s birthday and the apartment number of our previous address.

Finally, we finished our account set up and were taken to our dashboard. It seemed well-designed and straightforward, allowing us to catch up on alerts, our credit scores and reports, and more.

Later, however, when we tried to look at our credit information, nothing came up. It turned out this was just a glitch. In the meantime, we were still able to get our alerts and add new information to our account over the phone. As we continued to check our dashboard over time, there were no alerts to speak of, which meant that our identities were safe, for the time being.

ID Watchdog Features

Our Premium subscription came with access to an abundance of features. Most features fit into the following categories: identity, credit, financial, social, and recovery. Read on to find out more about our evaluation of the features in each category.

Identity

This broad category included monitoring for our names in a variety of areas, including the dark web; financial accounts, such as high-risk transactions and subprime loans; and legal information, such as public reports, change of address requests through USPS, and the national sex offender registry. If our information was found in any of these places, we’d receive an alert immediately.

Credit

ID Watchdog consistently monitors billions of data points, such as credit reports and VantageScore credit scores, for signs of credit fraud.

• Credit score tracking: Every day, we had access to our credit score from Equifax, which again, owns ID Watchdog.
• Credit reports: The monthly reports extended to all three bureaus.
  VantageScore credit scores: VantageScores are another way for lenders to decide who to loan money to, much like FICO scores.
• Lock credit reports: If we found activity on our credit reports from any bureau that we thought was fraudulent, we could lock them so that our score couldn’t be changed, saving our credit from possible disaster.

Financial

By monitoring our credit cards, investments, and savings accounts for possible fraud, ID Watchdog helped us identify potential threats early, and allowed us to minimize financial damages.

• Financial accounts monitoring: ID Watchdog monitored our investment, savings, credit, and credit card information for any potential fraudulent activity.
• Assistance for lost wallets: Sure, ID Watchdog couldn’t exactly make a lost wallet reappear, but they did help us cancel and replace our cards.
• Assistance for fraud alerts: We didn’t need it personally, but ID Watchdog can help less tech-savvy users set up fraud alerts with all three credit bureaus.
• Assistance for credit freezes: Luckily, we didn’t have to use this feature, but if our identities were stolen, ID Watchdog’s live support specialists would have helped us to freeze all our credit reports.

Social

ID Watchdog also helped us reduce uninvited solicitations. Not only did ID Watchdog add us to the National Do Not Call Registry, they greatly reduced the amount of junk mail we received, which helped us keep our minds, inboxes, and cell phones more organized.

Children’s Credit and Identity Safety

When we activated Child Credit Lock, we were able to create an Equifax credit report for any minor on our account, then freeze it. This freeze meant criminals who tried to open false accounts with that child’s enviable clean credit would be unable to.

Recovery

Had we experienced a large-scale identity theft, ID Watchdog would have provided us with resources and reimbursements to help get us back on our feet.

• Resolution specialists: If our identities were ever stolen, we’d be assigned an actual human, specifically a U.S-based customer care advocate to help us until everything was resolved.
• Identity theft insurance: We’d also be insured for up to $1 million in reimbursement if our identities were stolen, which is a relief given that the average identity theft leaves people $10,200 less rich.
• 401(K) HSA stolen funds reimbursement: ID Watchdog agreed to reimburse us up to $1 million for money stolen from our 401(K) or HSA funds, which included coverage for our employee stock options, health savings, and retirement accounts sponsored by our employers.

We found all this coverage super comprehensive, so, at least on paper, we felt really safe with ID Watchdog. But we were still unsure whether ID Watchdog was trustworthy as a company. Here’s what we discovered…

ID Watchdog Identity Theft Protection Features

Privacy and Security

It’s no secret that Equifax owns ID Watchdog. However, what not everyone knows is a couple of years back, Equifax had a gigantic data breach, which exposed the data of 147 million people.4 This breach occurred in 2017, the same year Equifax bought ID Watchdog. The worst part of it all is that Equifax has our data no matter what, and there’s no way to opt-out. The only thing we can do is monitor our credit reports and freeze them if we find anything fraudulent, which ID Watchdog covered for us.

A brief look at ID Watchdog’s privacy policy revealed some questionable information as well. All the information we gave ID Watchdog to monitor our identities, such as:

• Social Security numbers
• Payment information
• Transaction history
• Credit scores
• Credit history

These pieces of data are all stored by the company long term. On a positive note, ID Watchdog won’t share our information with third parties for marketing purposes. Plus, ID Watchdog encrypts our data using TLS, which stands for Transport Layer Security. Using a handshake method, TLS5 authenticated our sessions and made our connections secure.

Of course, since ID Watchdog is based in Denver, Colorado, the federal government could legally make them hand over customer data,6 but that’s true of all the identity monitoring services we’ve reviewed.

Subscription Options for ID Watchdog

Unlike other companies, ID Watchdog makes subscription options really simple: Select or Premium. Of course, we signed up for Premium so we could try out the full enchilada, which cost us $21.95 a month, although we could’ve saved $43.40 had we signed up for a year. There were also plans available for families, which covered two adults and up to four children. Identity Guard has family plans that cover up to 10 kids, as well as an Identity Guard spouse plan to keep your loved ones safe from cyberthieves. We found a much more limited menu of options with ID Watchdog, so this was a bit disappointing. In general, however, ID Watchdog’s pricing is reasonable, and we definitely got a lot of bang for our buck.

The ID Watchdog App

When we weren’t on our laptop, we checked out ID Watchdog via its mobile application for iOS, rated 2.1 out of five by customers. An Android version with a higher rating, 3.6 out of five, is also available on the Google Play store. We signed in with our username and password and even enabled Touch ID so we’d have to use our fingerprints to access our account on our phones.

After answering our security question, we were brought to the app’s main dashboard, which was supposed to show all our recent alerts. But again, when we tried to check our credit, nothing came up. Despite this blunder, it was very easy to navigate through the ID Watchdog app. Overall, we appreciated being able to quickly update and monitor most of our information through the ID Watchdog app.