MyTruston, a privacy friendly identity theft prevention/recovery service based on trust

Tom Fragala, CEO of MyTruston (Identity Theft Prevention and Recovery Services) has created a service for identity theft victims, where they don't have to put all their personal information (which was used to steal money) on another database.

This makes a lot of sense, when databases seem to be compromised, weekly. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has ample evidence supporting this in their chronology of data breaches, here.

The concept behind MyTruston is that preventing identity theft should be free. People only have to pay (if and when) they become a victim, and only do so, while in the recovery process.

In a recent conversation with Tom, I asked him what would happen if someone suspended the service, and changed their mind, later. He told me that the system would retain all their information, and they could start all over (as if they never left). Since identity theft can (raise it's ugly head over and over again) when new fraudulent accounts are opened, this is a pretty customer friendly feature.

Most of the current identity theft services count on a person paying for them over a long period of time, whether they use it, or not. In fact, these services are probably betting on making a lot of money from people, who never use them.

Additionally, with most of these services, you aren't covered unless you've paid the up-front premiums.

With MyTruston, the prevention part is free, and if you need to recover; you'll spend a lot less money and do it the right way (the first time). For $19.99 a month, that's a pretty fair deal.

There must be a lot of people not buying some of the current services on the market. Out of 205 million active credit customers, less than 5 percent subscribe to a service. This tells me that a lot of people aren't buying some of the services out there, but still might benefit from one.

Studies indicate that 1 in 5 of us has been a victim of identity theft in the past five years. People need to be able to go somewhere, they can both trust and takes care of the problem at a reasonable price.

MyTruston delivers this, and the service was designed by someone (Tom Fragala), who had a personal experience with identity theft. Many of the key principles behind the service, were based on his experience (as well as) more than a 1000 hours helping other victims.

The service is easy to use (I tested it myself) and it walked me through each recovery step. A person can stop in the process anywhere, and it automatically reminds you where you left off.

Tom is currently working on developing protection for more sophisticated forms of identity theft, and plans to roll them out in the near future. These forms of identity theft, which sometimes aren't very apparent, have been the subject of a lot of speculation, recently.

Identity theft is a problem that isn't going to disappear very soon.

Given current trends, Thomas Harkin (former director of Mastercards fraud division) recently predicted the problem could grow as much as 20 times in a USA Today article. One of the reasons for this is only an estimated 6 out of a 100 criminals stealing people's identities ever get convicted.

You can take a look at MyTruston, here.

Tom is also a fellow blogger, and covers this subject (identity theft) on his blog. I read and link to what he says, frequently.