Experian IdentityWorks Review

What Does Experian Give You? Plus How Much It Costs

After we signed up for our free trial, we spent a bit of time on the Experian website figuring out exactly what was included in our trial. It turned out, quite a lot.

Right off the bat, we have to say that Experian, like any other identity monitoring service, can’t fully protect your identity from being stolen. Rather, they alerted us when they found our credentials where they’re not supposed to be or when they detected warning signs, like someone taking $5,000 at once from our checking account. But even if our identities were stolen, that identity theft insurance would kick in, with either a $500,000 or million-dollar maximum reimbursement depending on the subscription we chose. We’d also have a fraud resolution specialist to help us pick up the pieces.

But ideally, Experian would actually prevent our identities from being stolen. They did this by monitoring:

• Dark web: The dark web, which might be 500 times larger than the normal web,2 is an area of the Internet where all of the users are anonymized, so it’s often where stolen credentials can be found. Experian scanned the dark web for us to ensure that we were safe.
• Social Security number: We only get one of these in our lifetimes, so it’s important that Experian lets us know if any other addresses or aliases are paired with our Social Security numbers.
• Address changes: As unlikely as this is, if someone did a “change of address” USPS form using our information, Experian would give us the heads up.
• Financial accounts: If anyone tries to open new bank accounts or control our actual bank account using our data, we’d be alerted.
• Payday and non-credit loans: Trying to get cash on the quick using our names? Not so fast. Experian can detect these attempts so that we’re the only people using our names to apply for non-credit loans.
• Court records: Experian scans the court system to see if any crimes were reported in our names.
• Sex offender registries: Although Experian alerted us when a sex offender moved into our neighborhood, they didn’t actually check to make sure our name wasn’t on it, which was a bit disappointing.
• File-sharing and social networks: Experian made sure we weren’t being abused on both social media as well as file-sharing networks.

We also got what Experian calls “lost wallet assistance,” meaning that all of the information in our wallets, like our driver’s license numbers, credit and debit card information, and insurance ID numbers were stored in a secure portal. If we ever end up losing our wallets, the restoration specialists would have helped us cancel the cards, replace them, what have you. Although we clearly could do this ourselves, it sounds nice to have a helping hand in what we assume would be a super-stressful time.

Being a credit bureau, of course, Experian also gave us some good information about our FICO and credit scores. We got credit reports and scores from all three bureaus, Equifax and TransUnion in addition to Experian, on the IdentityWorks Premium plan. We were also alerted of:

• Large changes to our financial accounts’ balances
• Credit being used
• Positive activity
• Dormant accounts
• FICO scores, which included our homes, bank cards, and cars.

FICO is a type of credit score used most frequently by lenders for over 25 years,3 if you didn’t already know. A three-digit number, it can affect the size, length, and interest rates of your loans. Made by the Fair Isaac Corporation, over 90% of the most commonly used lenders use FICO scores when making loan decisions. A good score is 670 or above, the higher the better. But don’t worry; if your score isn’t at this level, you can improve it over time, which is why it’s important to monitor it regularly. Scores over 800 or higher are considered exceptional.

And that’s everything that Identity Watch gave us, but how much did it set us back in the bank?

Experian Subscription Breakdown

After the 30-day free trial, we began paying for the Premium package, which cost us $19.99 a month. Of course, we could’ve saved some money and signed up for a year, but that’s just not our style. But it’s a good option for those looking to save money. And while we don’t have kids, there are options that include up to two adults and ten children, which should support most families.

One of the biggest differences between the two subscription options is the identity theft insurance maximum reimbursement. With the Plus plan, the maximum is $500,000, while the Premium Plan doubles to a million dollars, which is standard across the industry. The Premium plan also monitors more areas than the Plus plan, including:

• Financial account activity
• Identity validation alerts
• Payday loan monitoring
• Court records
• Sex offender registry
• File-sharing and social network monitoring.

The Premium plan monitors credit from all three credit bureaus (Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion), while the Plus plan only monitors credit from Experian. Plus, as Premium members, we received quarterly FICO score updates, and as we said, these are used by 90% of top lenders, making them incredibly important as well. Especially if we’re looking to invest in a mortgage or buy a car, we’ll want to know this score as well.

We think the Premium plan is definitely worth the extra $10 a month or $100 a year, but both plans provide excellent and comprehensive identity monitoring coverage. For one adult, a 30-day free trial is available, so we recommend signing up for Premium to try out all the features available.

Video Review

To see the Experian app in action, watch the below video. We’ll also go over pricing, ease of use, and other factors you need to know about Experian IdentityWorks.

Our User Experience with Experian

First, we created accounts on the Experian website, entering our names, addresses, emails, and phone numbers. Everything was completely free, for the first 30 days at least, so we didn’t need to enter any bank account or card information. Next, they asked for our Social Security numbers, birthdays, and phone number to verify our identities.

To further confirm our identities, we answered a few authentication quests that only took a few seconds. Finally, we created security questions, created a four-digit pin, and then clicked to view our credit. We were brought to a dashboard that had our credit score front and center plus links for a dark web scan, more detailed credit report, and more.

Naturally, we clicked on the dark web scan and got started.

When we got the report, we saw that our phone number was compromised. Experian gave us another phone number to call to see if our identities were compromised, which was helpful.

From there, we had the chance to enter in more information for Experian to monitor, like our driver license numbers, passport numbers, medical ID numbers, bank account, and credit card information, retail cards, and social networks. And that was it! Overall the process was really easy, and if we ever wanted to upgrade or downgrade our account, we could do that too. The page even had links to download their mobile apps so we can get updates on the go, which leads us to our next point…

The Experian App

For identity monitoring on the fly, we downloaded the Experian app onto our iPhones, although there’s also an Android version available with a 4.7 on the app store. The app itself was pretty minimal in terms of capabilities, although it worked well; while we could check our credit scores and reports and get alerts, we couldn’t see reports specific to identity monitoring, just credit. It seems like this app is definitely more focused on Experian’s specialty than it is IdentityWatch, which is a bit of a side hustle for them. Still, the app worked well and made it easy to check out our credit scores and see if our credentials were at risk via mobile notifications.

Is My Information Secure?

There’s no doubt that we fed Experian more information than we do our diaries, so it’s super important that that information stays protected. That’s why we added multi-factor authentication to our Experian account. In English? That means that we use fingerprint ID on our iPhones every time we log on, ensuring that we’re the only ones accessing our accounts.

Now, since Experian is based in California, an important thing to keep in mind is that technically, the United States government could force the company to give them their customer data, part of the international surveillance alliances Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, and 14 Eyes. If that’s the case, we wanted to make sure that Experian doesn’t keep too much information about us, which is why we consulted their privacy policy.4

There’s no easy way to say this: Experian keeps a ton of customer data, way more than is necessary to run their identity monitoring service. It started off innocent enough, with standard things like:

• Name
• Address
• Birthday
• Phone number
• Email
• Children’s names, Social Security numbers and birthdays, if any
• Debit or credit card information
• Billing address
• Answers to security questions
• Correspondence with the company.

Then, as we kept reading, things got a bit dicier, with Experian saving users’:

• IP address
• Time and pages visited
• Computer device type
• Operating system version
• Browser type and version
• Wireless carrier
• Wi-Fi status
• Crash logs
• Cookies
• Pixel tags…

…and many other device identifiers.

On top of that, Experian can share the data with third parties for advertising purposes, although that information would be aggregated and anonymized and users can opt-out if they want to. Still, we think it’s safe to say that Experian isn’t the best identity monitoring service for privacy. However, the good news is that the company hasn’t had any data breaches in recent memory, unlike the credit-monitoring bureau Equifax, which exposed 147 million people’s personal information.5 So unless privacy is a huge priority, Experian is still a trustworthy company in general.