I recently found a list of the top credit monitoring services. There were 11 listed. If you do a quick comparison of the 11 services, you will find that most of them provide reports from all three of the credit reporting agencies–Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. However, the reporting agencies themselves provide only their own credit reports and not those of their competitors.
Review of TransUnion.com
TransUnion.com offers a free 7-day trial membership that includes access to your TransUnion credit report. If you decide to continue on with the service after the initial 7-days (or forget to cancel your membership) you will get monthly monitoring of your TransUnion credit report and unlimited access to your TransUnion credit scores
TransUnion.com also provides $25,000 in ID theft insurance. However, don’t take that to mean that if you were to lose $10,000 because of identity theft you would get it all back from TransUnion.com. The $25,000 is basically insurance that would be used to clean up whatever issues were created by the identity theft but not to reimburse you for your loss.
Almost the least expensive
If you do decide to carry on with your TransUnion membership, it will cost you just $11.95 making it the second cheapest of the 11 services I checked out. However, it does rate only 2 stars vs. services such as CreditCheck Total®, Life Lock® and Equifax Score Watch®, all of which get 4 stars out of a possible five. LifeLock and CreditCheck both provide credit reports from all three of the current reporting services but, as noted above, Equifax gives you access only to its credit reports.
Easy to understand
While a TransUnion.com review rated an average of only 2 stars, one user noted that it was simple to order, and easy to understand. Another customer gave it good marks for its quick response time and that its reports were easy to understand. However, another customer commented that its customer service agents used hard-to-understand English and that his reports contained inaccuracies. For example, his he said his reports had balances showing in closed accounts where he didn’t even have accounts.
The negatives
Finally, a third customer said that he had spent weeks trying to get the Transunion site to dispute what he felt was bad information on his record with no success. Another reported negative was that once you signed up for the basic service, there was hard-sell to get you to pay another $9.99 a month for its credit monitoring service.
If you would be satisfied just being able to access your TransUnion credit report periodically, this service could be for you. However, if you are more interested in credit monitoring to spot identity theft, you might be better served to spend a few dollars more per month and subscribe to one of the services that rank 4 stars.