Marshall Brain's Blog

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I had read about a product called Credit Watch from Equifax. It seemed intriguing, and I wanted to check my credit report anyway, so I signed up. The idea is that, for a fee, Equifax will send you an email any time any company accesses your credit report or adds an entry to your credit report. The idea is that if someone tried to steal your identity, you would be able to detect it because there would be a flurry of activity on your credit report.

If you ignore the fact that they are charging you to look at your own data... It seems to work well. When something changes the email comes, and then you can go to a viewer page and see what happened. You get the name of the company accessing your file, the date and what they did.

The site also lets you submit disputes online and monitor them as they go through the process. It gives you access to your credit report and credit score, telling you what you need to do to improve the score. Overall it works as advertised.