As identity thieves become a bigger problem for people and businesses, many people wish they had someone or something to watch over and protect their valuable financial information.
Most people can't afford to hire a financial bodyguard, but many are using a real-time identity management service that can help stop identity theft.
Identity Sweep, which was made with MyPublicInfo.com and Affinion Group (www.affiniongroup.com), a leader in credit monitoring and identity theft, is the service I think is the most proactive. It may be the best way for the consumer to avoid having their identity used by criminals. Identity Sweep protects the identities of consumers in three ways:
It has cutting-edge technology to find identity fraud that looks through billions of public records for suspicious activity related to identity fraud, such as attempts to make a fake identity. The service looks at the strange behaviour and gives a risk score.
It looks for personal and financial information in Internet newsgroups, search engines, blogs, and hundreds of thousands of chat rooms and Web sites. It sends an e-mail to the customer right away if there is any suspicious activity with their personal information before the customer is hurt. This technology works faster than services that keep an eye on credit cards and credit bureaus.
It checks online directories for information about a consumer and asks for that information to be taken down so that telemarketers and identity thieves can't use it against them.