Credit Monitoring services are mostly a scam.

Have you seen an offer from your bank, credit card company, or Lifelock about credit monitoring?

Are you thinking about buying it?

Well, the good news is you can ignore their pushy sales tactics, and decline it when dark pattern dialog boxes pop up, and prevent fraud yourself.

A while back, I was talking about using strong randomly generated passwords and an authenticator program, such as Google Authenticator and GNOME Authenticator to manage one time codes.

It’s unlikely that anyone will sign into your accounts and rip you off if you do that, but there are still other ways to bilk you, like credit fraud.

The truth is, the credit reporting bureaus are required by federal and state laws to allow you to manage fraud alerts and credit file freezes on your own, but they don’t want you to know that because they were hoping you’d buy it from them.

In fact, everyone should have a fraud alert on their report, at all times, and strongly consider freezing their credit reports and only thawing them out for like a week if they go apartment or car shopping.

With all of the data leaks out there, it’s only a matter of time before many people who shouldn’t know your Social Security number have it, mainly due to things like Windows ransomware infecting your doctor’s computer records or Capital One being negligent with their security practices and data breaches involving Microsoft Azure.

Or in the case of my husband, his sister is a fraud artist who the government and the police refuse to arrest.

If you have these credit monitoring services, they are making you pay out the nose for things you can do yourself. For free. And if someone commits fraud against you using your credit cards or empties your bank account, these credit monitoring companies can’t do anything about it anyway, plus federal laws put financial institutions on the hook for reimbursing your losses.

The reason they don’t want you to know about this is that fraud alerts (which you can get with or without freezing your credit, which locks people out entirely), requires the lender to stop and do something to verify who you really are. And that gets in the way of them doing what they really want.

Blindly issuing millions of accounts and making you stop and notice if any of them are fraudulent, after your credit report is ruined and you’re turned over to a collection agency because your sister-in-law got ahold of your husband’s SSN and decided to open credit cards to fund more shopping trips.

See, these companies eat losses all the time, and they probably won’t even notice. They can sell the fraud accounts off to a collection firm for nearly as much as if you had actually paid them, and then you’re dealing with some bottom feeder that’s taking you to court.

So they have absolutely no reason to want anything slowing them down from approving more accounts. Even if many of them are fraudulent. It costs them more money to slow down than to charge off accounts.

But by taking steps to secure your credit files, you can stop identity thieves from ripping you blind like this in the first place.

If you’re still having thoughts about Lifelock, remember that when the CEO put his real SSN on their commercials, he was the victim of fraud in several hundred incidents involving practically every state in the country, including some guy buying an RV.

If it works so well, how did that happen?

Unfortunately, Discover Card has their own now and every so often I have to decline it (For $15 a month, on both of our accounts!) because it will pop up when I’m trying to log in to pay the credit card bill.

Credit One Bank gave my bankrupt cousins some credit cards, then sued them later for not paying the bill, which was over the limit, which incurred more fees. One thing that put them over the limit was a $8 a month credit monitoring charge. (And a bunch of nonsense like going to Starbucks every day. Nobody accused them of managing money well.)

The reason I know this is because when you get sued in Indiana, the entire lawsuit becomes public record, and anyone can use the courts to see your unpaid bills, line by line.

Why would you agree to credit monitoring when your credit is ruined by bankruptcy followed by not paying your bills AGAIN? Somewhere along the way, they got fast talked into agreeing to this.