Credit Karma To Monitor IDs For Free

Credit Karma, the free credit monitoring company, announced news on Monday (Oct. 23) of the launch of free ID monitoring.

In a blog post, Adam Boender, a product manager at Credit Karma, said that with the new free service, the credit monitoring company can alert its customers as soon as possible if they have been affected by a data breach or if there is suspicious activity on their accounts.

The idea behind the new service is this: The sooner customers know they were part of a hack, the quicker they can take action. The service comes amid a massive data breach at Equifax that put 145.5 million U.S. customers’ personal information at risk for fraud. The data breach also included 209,000 credit card account numbers.

Credit Karma said the new service will continuously search the internet to detect when one’s personal information may have been exposed. It also provides an alert when there is suspicious account activity, with the potential for a compromise of data, and offers advice and next steps to take, including reporting fraud, freezing credit or changing passwords.

“And this is just the start. In the coming months, we will continue to add more functionality, including dark web monitoring, as well as ID recovery guidance if your identity has been stolen,” said Boender in the blog post. “Over the last ten years, you’ve come to rely on us as we continue to look for ways to help you save money and stay on top of your financial identity, and we take that trust seriously. As part of our mission to be your financial assistant, it made a lot of sense for us to build and provide ID monitoring as data breaches have become more prevalent.”

The ID monitoring service is available for free to members in the U.S.