IdentityForce Reviews

As you probably know, there are millions of cases of fraud every year in this country. According to some experts, as many as one-third of U.S. adults will fall victim to some form of identity theft in their lifetime, and things are only getting worse.1

With the direction things are heading, it’s smart to take a proactive approach about identity protection, even if that means investing in an identity theft protection service. In this review, we’ll take you through one of the most recognized services out there — IdentityForce.

First Impressions

Right out of the gates, IdentityForce gave us the vibe of an industry-leader, one that is experienced, well-versed in identity theft solutions, and an authority in identity theft monitoring. Their website is well-designed, and it has a ton of useful information. There’s even an informative section where you can get tips on how to avoid identity theft and improve your overall digital security. Of course, a lot of its content is geared toward promoting its products, but there’s no denying that the information is useful.

IdentityForce Home Page

We went ahead and selected IdentiyForce’s UltraSecure+Credit plan. It’s a little pricey at $23.99 per month, but as the saying goes — you get what you pay for. While the basic plan affords some protection for $17.99 per month, UltraSecure+Credit comes with the features we really wanted.

That said – IdentityForce is currently running a promotion for a limited time where its top-tier plan is a whopping 33% percent off. An UltraSecure+Credit plan for individuals now costs $15.99 per month. Even bigger savings await you if you go with an annual plan, which now only costs $159.99. We never shy away from taking advantage of deals like this.

Deals aside, though, if you’re looking to purchase identity theft protection, we wouldn’t recommend anything that doesn’t include three-bureau credit monitoring. IdenityForce’s basic plan and others that only offer one-bureau monitoring are, simply put, incomplete protection. You wouldn’t deadbolt your door, but leave the window wide open, would you?

With that in mind, here are the latest plans and pricing from IdentityForce.

Just to give you some context, IdentityForce is a little north of the middle in terms of pricing. There are cheaper options out there, like IDShield or Identity Guard — the former’s basic plan will set you back $14 per month, and the latter only $9. If you’re looking to spend more, there are more premium services like LifeLock, but that goes for around $30 per month, so IdentityForce is a good, solid middle ground, as you’ll learn throughout this review.

Getting Started with IdentityForce

After clicking “sign me up,” we were prompted to enter some really basic personal information and to select our billing frequency. Note that the first 30 days are free, but after the 30-day free trial you’ll be charged on either an annual or monthly basis. The annual plan will save you about 50 bucks over the course of the year, but if you’re not willing to commit for that long, you can select monthly — that’s what we went with since we’re comparison shoppers by nature.

On the next screen, we entered our credit card information and agreed to IdentifyForce’s terms and conditions. Once complete, we were given a confirmation of purchase and were prompted to provide our sensitive data like phone numbers and social security information. We know… it’s riveting. But we recommend being as thorough as possible here; don’t just fill in only what’s required. While it might seem tedious, you want to get your money’s worth, and you get that by providing as much information as possible for IdentityForce to protect.

IdentityForce Account Monitoring

Now, there were little things here and there that made us feel that IdentityForce really cares about the security of our personal information. Case in point: After entering our personal information, IdentityForce had us set up two-factor authentication. Since our account contains lots of sensitive information, this simple measure ensured that no one else could access our account. We had our code sent to our phone number and it processed quickly.

After that, the next screen asked us to set our notification preferences. Since we’d be setting up the app later, we decided to skip that for now.

IdentityForce Two-Factor Authentication

Digging Into the Dashboard

Alright! Now that we were all set entering the information we wanted to monitor, we were redirected to our dashboard.

Here’s another one of those little things we told you about earlier. Each element on the dashboard could be expanded to see what it means, and the explanations were clear and concise. We really appreciate that; some of the other services we’ve tested kind of made us figure things out on our own. Not so with IdentityForce.

IdentityForce Dashboard

Now that we’d oriented ourselves, it was time to drill into IdentityForce’s features and functionality. Even after entering all of our information at registration, our protection status percentage — which we found at the bottom of the screen — was an uncomfortably low 43 percent.

IdentityForce Protection

As you may know, we’ve been doing this a long time. And we like to think we’re better protected than the average Joe. So what’s with 43%? To be honest, we’re not really sure how IdentityForce figures this number, so let’s just take it with a grain of salt for now.

Setup and Daily Use

We figured the best place to start was with our credit monitoring. Three-bureau protection is why we selected this plan in the first place, after all.

To initiate monitoring, we authenticated our account by agreeing to some more terms and services, re-entering our social security number, and activating the service. Once that was done, we had to answer some security questions. Again, these steps may seem tedious, but they go to show that IdentityForce is serious about keeping identities safe.

IdentityForce Security Questions

Once our service was activated, we were really impressed with how much detail was available to us. Some services really skimp on this, but IdentityForce lets us view our credit reports in overwhelming detail, explains exactly why our credit scores are what they are, and tracks them month over month for us. It’s worth noting, though, that the tracker pulls data from TransUnion only; it’s not a combined score from all three major credit bureaus. It’s not a huge deal, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t point that out.

We’d love to show you the detail IdentityForce provided us with, but our photo editor would get a migraine censoring all of our sensitive information. Trust us when we say this is the gold standard of what you’re looking for in a credit monitoring service. In fact, it’s similar to what we’ve seen from other top options like Identity Guard.

Another interesting feature that we think you’ll like is IdentityForce’s Credit Score Simulator. Here we could play around with a tremendous amount of factors that go into calculating our score. Again, we could only play with our TransUnion score, but we could see how adding a personal loan or canceling a card would impact our score. We could see this service being really valuable for someone looking to buy a home or improve their credit score for other reasons. Major points for IdentityForce, here.

IdentityForce Credit Score Simulator

After playing around with creative ways to absolutely trash our good credit (here’s a hint, don’t raise your credit card balance by 500 percent while declaring bankruptcy) we moved over to the final item on the credit score and reports page — Freeze my Credit. A quick note on this, if you’ll allow us to get on our soapbox for just a second.

Your credit should always be frozen unless you are actively attempting to secure a loan. While it’s not commonly known, a credit freeze is simple and free — you just have to contact the three bureaus and request they do it. Some identity theft protection services, like IDWatchdog, will do this for you, but however you do it, you should get it done. A credit lock prevents bad actors from taking out new lines of credit in your name and is one of the most simple, effective ways average folks can prevent identity theft.

That said — IdentityForce doesn’t actually manage the freeze for you, it simply directs you to each of the credit bureau’s websites where you can do it yourself. It’s beyond the scope of this review to start talking about each bureau’s user experience, but suffice it to say, it’s not too big of a headache. Unless you’re planning on buying a house or a car in the near future, we highly recommend you take this step.

Alright, now that we had our credit frozen at all three bureaus, we moved on to setting up our financial monitoring. This was a relatively easy process, but rather than connecting directly to the account like other services, IdentityForce had us manually input our card numbers, account numbers, and routing numbers.

IdentityForce Bank Account Monitoring

On the one hand, this is a little frustrating because we know how simple it is to link accounts using other services, but on the other, this is good for additional security, just as long as you double-check that you’ve entered everything correctly.

Other services we’ve used typically connect to banking institutions using third-party vendors, and the more middlemen involved in a transaction like that, the bigger the threat. Was this IdentityForce’s reasoning, though? Oddly enough, when we set up transaction monitoring, we connected directly to our bank using IdentityForce’s connection vendor Thawte. We’re sure there’s a reason behind this, but from a user-experience standpoint, it feels a little inconsistent. Just something to note.

IdentityForce and Bank of America

Once that was set up, we were able to see all of our account information and transactions from our dashboard. Again, we can’t show you this, so you’ll just have to take our word for it when we tell you it’s very detailed. After that, we were able to set up our alert notifications and tether those to thresholds for purchases, withdrawals, transfers, and other types of money-moving. For instance, we could choose to be notified whenever a withdrawal over $200 is made from our checking account. We also really like that they monitor for duplicate transactions — while they aren’t super common, they do happen, and unless you’re checking your accounts every day, they can slip by unnoticed.

Once that was done, we noticed that we had some notifications under the “identity” category. Uh oh — better look into that.

IdentityForce Email Monitoring

We’d really like to commend IdentityForce here. We’ve put a lot of these services through their paces, and it’s rare that we come across one whose notifications are as detailed and helpful as IdentityForce. They told us what the alert is, why we were getting it, what we should do, and the details of each issue. The alert system’s actionable nature made us feel like we were really in the driver’s seat with all of this.

IdentityForce Email Address Monitoring Alert

Once we got through the notifications and made the necessary adjustments (password is now changed, thank you very much) we headed over to the final category of protection — social media.

Here we were able to link our accounts among the platforms IdentityForce supports. For those keeping score, that would be Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. The process was super easy — just make sure you have your pop-up blocker disabled on the site and click through allowing IdentityForce access to the account. Simple enough!

IdentityForce Social Media Monitoring

Once we had our accounts activated, we could select what types of monitoring we’d like performed including inappropriate activity, malware and phishing attempts, impersonation, and account hacking activity. We went with the full gamut just to see if IdentityForce turned anything up. And we were surprised to see the Hacked Account alert.

IdentityForce Social Media Alert

We checked out the post in question and it was fine. Off-color? Perhaps. Obvious hacking? Not so much. Honestly, we’re not exactly sure why it was flagged as a hacking attempt, but we’d always rather be safe than sorry. Appreciate you lookin’ out, IdentityForce.

So after we had the core functionality established and rolling, we started looking around for some other bells and whistles. We were a little disappointed to find very little in extra perks. Many identity protection services offer some pretty significant add-ons like IDShield’s sex offender monitoring or LifeLock’s VPN access, but aside from a “resources” tab, that was about it with IdentityForce.

To be fair, the resource tab is pretty neat. It offers several different tools to help us make informed buying decisions including loan comparison, debt consolidation, mortgage qualification, credit card comparison, auto financing, and mortgage refinancing calculators. Not what we were expecting, but a pretty cool bonus. Overall we were happy with everything IdentityForce offered, but still, for the price point, we expected just a little more.

IdentityForce Features

New Features

The company has recently added some functionality to its identity theft protection service, making an already solid product even better. Let’s take a look at the recent additions:

• Solicitation reduction – IdentityForce now has a function where members can opt-out of unsolicited phone calls and emails. While there’s already a junk mail reduction feature, the additional solicitation reduction offers added protection from annoying spam calls and messages.
• White-glove family restoration – IdentityForce has expanded their standard restoration services, making it available for any family member of the primary account holder’s household including parents, siblings, and children. This is great news for people looking to protect everyone with one comprehensive plan.
• Deceased family member fraud remediation – Unfortunately, even our loved ones who have passed away aren’t immune to fraud. This new service will help protect and restore the identity of those who are enrolled in an IdentityForce Family Plan at the time of their death, and later became the victim of identity theft.
• Stolen funds replacement – It’s not uncommon that real-world dollars are stolen during an identity theft incident. Should this happen, IdentityForce now offers coverage for up to $1 million. Worth noting, though, that depending on your specific IdentityForce plan, the amount of insurance coverage may vary.
• Updated dark web data analysis – This new, algorithm-based process that plumbs the depths of the dark web to locate breached personal information. If identifying information is found, IdentityForce will determine exactly how worried you should be of your identity being stolen through a numeric rating.
• VPN Access – IdentityForce is now taking the next step in proactive protection by offering its users access to a virtual private network, or VPN for short. A VPN works by routing your web traffic through an encrypted server, making it impossible for hackers to pinpoint your IP address. If that reads like greek to you, it’s okay – basically what it means is that instead of accessing the internet through the regular channels, you’re going to be going through your own private tunnel to get there. All of your interactions online will be far more secure, and bad actors will have a much harder time getting their mitts on your personal information.

Insurance and Assurance

Now that we’ve unpacked all of IdentityForce’s features and offerings, let’s take a minute to discuss the support they offer. Should we become the victim of identity theft, we felt confident knowing that they offer fully managed restoration and recovery services from certified experts that are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. These specialists complete the paperwork, make the calls, and do the grunt work to ensure customers’ identities are restored. IdentityForce isn’t alone with these restoration offerings, but these are among the best we’ve seen.

Also keep in mind that the company’s standard insurance policy covers up to $1 million per member, with a zero-dollar deductible. This covers the costs of reimbursement of stolen funds that aren’t covered by other policies or banking regulations. It also covers out-of-pocket expenses and lost wages. It’s a comforting thought that if anything goes wrong, we’re covered.

But hey, we’re not always sitting in front of our computer monitoring our identity — we’re out and about. I mean, not so much in the past couple of years because of the global health crisis, but you know what we mean. We wanted to test out IdentityForce’s mobile app to see if its functionality was as good as its desktop counterpart. So we headed over to the app store.

Mobile App Experience

After downloading the IdentityForce app, we’re sorry to report we weren’t really blown away. First of all, it’s a little weird that there’s no real design continuity between the desktop and the mobile experiences. While the desktop dashboard is on a white background with navy-blue lettering, the app sits on a dark gray background with an amber and green font scheme. For comparison:

Here’s the desktop version:

IdentityForce Desktop Dashboard

And here’s the mobile version:

IdentityForce Mobile Desktop

See what we mean?

Design choices aside, the app is also a bit clunky to use. The log-in process is tedious and repeats every time you leave the screen. Instead of simply tapping our finger to use the biometric authentication feature, we had to click a button to tell it we wanted to use our fingerprint. While it might sound nitpicky, it’s this lack of attention to user experience that sometimes turns us off from mobile apps.

IdentityForce App Login

And finally, there just wasn’t a whole lot to do on the app. Sure, we could mess with our alert settings and what was and wasn’t monitored, but compared to the richness of the desktop experience, it just felt lacking. Like many other services, this app feels like an afterthought.

Now, this definitely isn’t a deal-breaker for us. After all, we really enjoyed the IdentityForce desktop interface. And these days, we’re almost always within a few strides of our laptop. We were just hoping for a little something extra with the app.

The Big Picture of IdentityForce

While we were a little disappointed in the app and IdentityForce’s lack of frills, the attention they paid to their product’s core functionality quickly made us forget about those minor shortcomings.

The detail in the credit monitoring alone makes it well worth the price of admission. And let’s not forget about their credit score tracking and restoration services.

While it’s not our absolute favorite — that would be Aura (see our review of Aura) — if you’re looking for solid identity protection at a reasonable price point, we’d highly recommend IdentityForce.

IdentityForce FAQs