myFICO Score Watch with FICO Email Alerts – Review

Score Watch is the set-it-and-forget-it credit score product. This product is a subscription service which unlike many monitoring services pushes FICO credit score updates to you in the form of email and SMS cell text messages.

How Score Watch Works

Typically, a consumer will start using this product by pulling one of the 2 reports available, leaving the 2nd one for a later date. Once you get your report, the Score Watch platform keeps a history of your credit scores going forward and is checking to see when your score changes. But it also allows you to be notified in case you change interest rate qualifying bands.

Score Watch has five tabs that make up the product. The tab that means the most is the settings tab. Here you can set the score you want alerts when you reach that target. Next, you can set targets for account percentage increases, dollar increases (e.g. $500) and notification of usage of inactive cards.

The other tabs track your history and also show you

The company was smart about security in that you get alerts that say “ your score has increased by 11 points” instead of saying “your new score is 726”. This is nice should your email or cell phone be compromised at some point.

This is a great product for someone looking to find out exactly when their score peaks to apply for loans at the best time. It also works well as an ID theft product as ID theft would lead to a noticeable score alert.

ID Theft Prevention and Basics – Lesson #7

This Lesson Addresses Fraud and Identity Theft

This is a big topic so we are going to split it up and we will cover the “definitions” and ID theft prevention in this lesson and how to “treat” an Identity theft in Lesson 8 and then in Lesson 9, we will address Fraud Freezes and Fraud Alerts and when to use each one.

There are generally 2 terms that are thrown around quite a bit so first we need to clarify…the difference between credit card theft and Identity theft.

I have a really smart, i.e. highly educated friend who thinks these are the same. Wrong! So here’s the difference. Existing Credit Card theft is one type of ID theft. Credit Card theft is when some one uses your card to make purchases. The other two types are New Accounts and Existing non credit card account fraud. These together make up the major categories of ID theft. One major difference, your credit card has a nice little law protecting it, so that you are only liable for $50 per card. But you have to dispute the charges within 60 days to get this protection.

So let’s start with Prevention

What’s the best way to protect yourself? Here’s our list of the best preventative tips.

Remember this Phrase: Protect, Detect, Resolve, Block

Okay, first, protect your personal information. Don’t give out your SSN or other personal information unless you know it’s a trusted source, and keep a list of account numbers in a safe place.
Next, manage your mail. Here’s the pattern we use at my house. I pick up the mail and walk to the recycle bin, I dump all the catalogs and non-personal junk and then walk to the shredder to put in my credit card/loan offers that keep coming. Yes, you need to shred these. Then I put the rest on my desk. Having a system will avoid large piles to sort through each month.

If you’re not already online, Get online. Online consumers check their accounts more frequently which mean less damage is done should a fraud occur. Note that in a Javelin study, the average was $551 in losses when detected online vs. average $4,543 when detected from paper statements. A Harris Interactive study says that 50% of all households pay some bills online. So, if you are online, your risk is a great loss would appear to be lessened.

We realize that the other 50% of you out there are saying ” I don’t shop online” or “I don’t do anything online” or that “the Internet is evil”. Saying you are going to stay offline is like saying I refuse to use an ATM or I refuse to use a cordless phone”, it’s simply not feasible. Look… we are not asking you to get a computer and internet access if you don’t have it. You can do this from your library as long as you are careful to log in and out of your accounts. Besides, online ID theft is just about 10% of all ID theft. The real common ways ID theft happens are stolen wallets, checkbooks and credit cards.

Next tip: Check your accounts regularly. One study suggests 40% of us don’t review our statements on a regular basis, or even at all. ID thieves are counting on this!! You should review your accounts online once a week. Or check into the email alert service many banks have so you can be alerted for large balance changes. Wamu’s credit card has numerous setting options for alerts, where you can set to be notified various ways. Here we are setting an alert to be notified when my balance goes over $500.

A new service called Mint.com sends out alerts for you if your bank doesn’t offer this service. Mint is neat as it consolidates all your cards in one place.

Start using a credit-monitoring product or at a minimum check your credit free once a year at annualcreditreport.com. The annualcreditreport.com site is just okay as you only get your free report 1 time per year. The monitoring products are the “”Set it and Forget it” approach. Since we realize that checking your accounts once/week is simply not ideal for most people on the go — we like monitoring products as a simple alternative.

The good news, it that most of the monitoring products do ID theft protection – even if they are not marketed this way. Score Watch, while not marketed as an ID theft product, provides great monitoring. By the way, you may see ads for $1MM in id theft insurance included with some products. That’s no different than $20-25k in insurance as they only pay recovery fees i.e. it only covers your loss and legal and professional fees. And as you saw above, with an average fraud loss of $4543, much of this covered through your credit card’s $50 liability, $20K-$25K of insurance is just fine.

If you are past the stage of needing credit – for example, you own your house, own your car and don’t need any new cards, and not likely to need credit for anything– you may want to do a credit freeze. [We discuss Freezes in Lesson 9]. Okay this isn’t right for most of us, but what about your parents, or your aunt or uncle. The elderly are common targets of ID theft as they often have great credit scores and aren’t checking accounts as frequently. Yet, they often don’t ever need new credit.

We know this might seem like a lot to digest, but remember you have options, you can do much of the legwork yourself by disciplining yourself to check accounts regularly or you can pay a monitoring service to do it for you

In the next lesson, we’ll discuss how to deal with an ID theft if you get victimized.

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