Guard Dog ID Review
Introduction
Guard Dog ID is a relatively new company, having just gone public in 2005. The firm specializes in identity theft detection, rather than prevention; that is, the services you’ll be paying for scan public and credit records and provide credit alerts when your accounts are tampered with, but they don’t provide for fraud alerts or credit locks on your accounts, nor does Guard Dog ID take any of the proactive steps—junk mail removal, risk assessment, etc.—that some other companies take in the course of defending their clients’ identities.
Pricing Details and Features
That being said, Guard Dog ID also features the least expensive identity protection plan we’ve seen: for only $2.95 per month (or less than $25 for a year) you get a limited suite of identity protection tools, mostly geared toward informing and educating businesses and consumers rather than actually doing very much for them if their identities are stolen or information is breached. The information, however, is quite extensive: a listing of nearby sex offenders; missing child alerts; alerts regarding new computer viruses that could result in information breach; and an ID Risk Report that lets customers know how well they are protecting their identities. In addition, all customers receive the BreachWire service, a data breach monitor that notifies Guard Dog ID members when a detected data breach might have an effect on them.
The company offers more extensive protection and information packages as well. Its Superior Protection plan, for example, offers three bureau credit reports and scores, as well as monitoring for all three major bureaus and PayDay loan monitoring, designed to notify you if a payday loan is taken out in your name. Guard Dog ID’s $1 million identity theft insurance comes with no deductible and covers lost wages, illegally-transferred funds, and other investigative expenses incurred during an identity theft investigation.
The Superior plan runs $19.95 per month with a 10% discount available if customers pay for an entire year. The Premium Protection plan runs a bit less—only $14.95 per month, with the same 10% discount if enrolling annually—but the credit monitoring, reporting, and scoring services only come from one credit bureau, rather than all three. The Advanced Protection plan ($9.95/month) doesn’t include any credit monitoring services, but it does come with the complete suite of identity protection and recovery tools, including full public records monitoring, online information monitoring, and the $1 million insurance policy, among other things.
Guard Dog ID is in the process of adding additional services, including CleanID, a service the company maintains will “revolutionize our identity theft protection service once again.” It remains to be seen what these offerings will entail, and what they will cost.