How our rankings are derived
Our analysis of these identity theft protection companies are compiled through many factors. We have a dozen advanced criteria that we use to review each provider’s service and rate them upon how they do in each field. Our ranking criteria is based off of 100’s of hours of research from data and statistical analysis. Some criteria are weighted more heavily than others depending on how critical they are for the consumer.
Being able to protect the consumer is the most important factor when choosing identity protection. The more thorough a service is with their monitoring, the higher the score they received. It’s important for a service to provide daily credit monitoring, constant internet scanning, being able to place credit freezes, and having instant fraud alerts are paramount. If a service does not have these minimum parameters, then they will get docked in their score. Obviously, if a provider has additional monitoring services to keep their customers from getting their identity stolen in the first place, they receive a higher score.
Price is a large factor when it comes to ranking. Most companies have multiple pricing options for the added flexibility to cater to all income levels. The companies who offer the most pricing options received higher scores for this criteria.
Recovery of Identity is how well the service provider restores your identity if a breach does happen. The main focus here is to see if they do all the heavy lifting for you so you don’t have to deal with it all. It’s important that they not only take care of just your financial losses, but to recover anything else which may have been compromised like your medical identity or credit score.
It should be mandatory for an identity theft protection company to have an insurance policy. Almost all of them have $1 Million policy (some more) to recoup any costs associated with the identity theft. What is important for our rankings is looking into the fine print of each of these companies for their different policies and stipulations.
The customer service and how helpful they are over the phone is very important. Having your identity stolen is an extremely stressful situation to be in so it’s important that you are being helped by professional and caring specialists on the other end. We called all of these identity theft protection companies to get a sense of who is knowledgeable and most willing to help. We also factored in if they were available 24/7.
We factor in if providers have family protection options. Children and seniors are the fastest growing segment of the population that are targeted now for identity theft. We want to make sure there are plans to accommodate them as well and rank providers accordingly.
Along with other criteria, we also take into account if the provider has extra benefits that others don’t offer. An example would be offering computer antivirus software, or keyboard encryption software, having a mobile APP, or offering password protection for all your passwords being kept in one place.
We believe we are experts on identity theft. We take our reviews very seriously and want to help as many people make the correct choice that is best suited for their personal situation.
