Founded in 2005, IdentityForce Inc. is a Massachusetts-based corporation that provides identity theft protection services to US consumers, businesses and government agencies.
The company's products offer you instant access to credit reports and scores from one or all three big-name providers: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. A credit score tracker and mobile apps (iOS and Android) allow you to manually check your details at any time.
IdentityForce also has a comprehensive monitoring system which provides near real-time alerts to potentially suspect behavior. Items covered include searches on your credit report, changes of address, new accounts being opened in your name, payday loans taken out using your social security number, your details appearing in court records or on sex offender registers, and your personal information being found on the dark web. If any issues are discovered you'll immediately be informed via SMS and email.
Unusual protection features include PC-based anti-phishing and anti-keylogger software, hopefully reducing the chance that you'll fall victim to malware or web-based identity theft scams.
If everything fails and your details are abused anyway, IdentityForce can help with toll-free customer service, a restoration team to get your life back in order (fill in paperwork, make calls, close old accounts, open new ones and more), and there's even an insurance policy that will refund you up to $1 million of money stolen by identity theft. (As with all insurance policies, there's a lot of small print – there's more about the exclusions here if you're interested.)
The IdentityForce UltraSecure+Credit plan gives you all the features we've described for $23.99 a month, or $239.90 a year. That's a reasonable price for what you're getting, although some competing products are fractionally cheaper (ID Watchdog's similar Platinum plan is $219 per year).
The IdentityForce UltraSecure plan drops the three-bureau credit monitoring, reports and scores, and doesn't include the credit score tracker, though otherwise gives you all the same reports. This is a little less thorough, but only very marginally, and the price drops to $17.99 a month, or $179.90 a year.
- We tell you how to check if your identity has been stolen
Reports
All identity theft protection services enable access to a vast amount of confidential details, and so it's important that they work hard to secure your account. IdentityForce certainly does that, protecting access to its services with a username and password system, along with a security question and two-factor authentication which sends codes via email, text or phone. Or if that's too much hassle, Touch ID fingerprint access gives you quick and easy logins from any compatible device.
Basic access to the service is available from the IdentityForce iOS and Android apps. These don't have much depth – you can't do much more than check out your credit score – but they do allow you to get near instant alerts of anything suspect, and that's a capability well worth having.
Using a browser to access the main site allows browsing your full credit report (if available in your plan), and gives you control over the various IdentityForce options and settings.
For example, IdentityForce doesn't just raise alerts when something changes in your credit report. You can select specific bank or credit accounts you'd like the service to watch, define transaction types of interest (purchases, withdrawals, transfers, and duplicates) and set limits for each one (raise an alert for purchases above $300, withdrawals above $500, and so forth).
Elsewhere, welcome bonus features include a Social Media Identity Monitoring suite. Point the service at your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, and Instagram accounts and it'll monitor your streams for malicious links, as well as looking for hacked and imposter accounts. It's a neat way to reduce your exposure to hacker attacks, and some additional parental controls-style tools allow monitoring posts for profanity or signs of cyber-bullying.
If the service doesn't work as you expect, you could turn to the support site. You're likely to be disappointed, though, as it has relatively few articles, and most are distinctly lacking in detail. There's a search feature, but it's site-wide, so for instance when we searched for information on the IdentityForce anti-keylogger software, we just found general mentions of keyloggers on the IdentityForce blog.
Fortunately, you don't have to rely on the website. IdentityForce offers support via email, live chat and telephone, which is available 24/7 (apart from major holidays), a high level of service which beats most of the competition.
Final verdict
IdentityForce offers a very comprehensive set of tools for preventing, detecting or recovering from identity fraud. In short, it’s a great service, and the only real downer here is the support website which is rather lackluster.
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