MyTruston -- where you can see if someone is stealing your identity for free!

You won't get a million dollar guarantee and Tom Fragala's social security number if you decide to use myTruston identity theft prevention/recovery services. You also aren't going to get the paid endorsements for his product by Fred Thompson, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or Howard Stern.

Tom, who is the CEO/Founder of MyTruston doesn't believe in buying endorsements, paying bloggers, or doing massive advertising campaigns to promote his service.

He trusts that once a prudent consumer looks at his product and the value it provides, the service sells itself.

Tom was an identity theft victim himself and has spent thousands of hours advocating for other victims. Many of the basic principles behind myTruston were based on both of these personal experiences.

What you get with myTruston is a "piece of mind" that if you have to protect yourself from identity theft -- your information isn't being exposed in another place -- where it might be compromised.

Preventing identity theft using myTruston is and always has been free, you only pay for the recovery services, if and when you need them.

Most identity theft services require that you provide them with all of your personal information, and in some instances, even your power of attorney.

With myTruston you can protect your identity, and if need be, recover from identity theft without giving up your information to a third-party.

With call centers being outsourced -- the possibility of insider theft, and hacking techniques that seem to routinely defeat current security technology -- this might be something to think about when protecting your identity and financial well-being.

All identity theft services bundle free services that theoretically could be done for free. It's a low overhead and immensely profitable business. The trick to it is making sure you do everything properly, and this is where a third-party service can add value.

The unique twist with Truston is that it's free to prevent identity theft and you only pay to recover from it. In other words, you don't pay for something that might never happen to you, which seems to be a common denominator with a lot of the services out there.

Many of the services out there charge $10.00 and up a month to protect you, which is free at myTruston. Many of them (also) do not cover you if you were compromised before you paid for their services (read the fine-print).

What Truston provides is an easy do-it-yourself (DIY) platform that makes it easy for the average person to ensure they are not being compromised, and take effective action if they have been.

Truston recently announced they were upgrading their service and lowering the cost of their paid (recovery) service. The paid portion of the service only needs to be used as long as the customer feels it is necessary.

Here is a portion of the announcement from their blog:

This week we released a new version of our award-winning myTruston service. The new features are FREE to current members for a 45–day free trial period. These four new prevention and privacy services are:

1. Credit bureau fraud alerts
2. Chexsystems fraud alerts
3. Stop pre-approved credit offers
4. Stop telemarketing calls

We updated our product names: we now have myTruston Free and myTruston Plus. myTruston Free has the same features since we first launched (inspecting your credit reports year round). myTruston Plus includes what you get with Free, the four new prevention/privacy features, and our ID theft recovery tools. Also, the price for the Plus service is reduced 50% to just $10 a month!

What I like about these new features is they begin to address the growing problem of synthetic identity theft. Synthetic identity theft occurs when different parts of people's identity are crafted to form another one. This is getting to be a big problem, which is expected to get worse.

In the near future, employers will have to take action when they have employees, who have social security numbers that don't match their names. In the past, this was never enforced, and social security numbers could be made up (literally).

With this new development, up to 20 million illegal immigrants are going to have to use social security numbers that match an identity. This could lead to an explosion in the already staggering amount of identity theft that is occurring.

Watching your identity carefully, is probably a better idea than ever before.

The Chexsystems alerts are a part of this new effort. Fraudulent checks that tie into identity assumptions do not always show up on credit reports.

In case you missed the Certegy data breach, where 8.5 million people's checking account information was compromised, this might be something that will help a few people out there. Please note this compromise was accomplished by a not very honest insider, therefore no amount of computer security could have stopped it.

Two other enhancements are the ability to put yourself on the no-call lists and stop all those pre-approved credit offers. Most privacy experts recommend we do this to avoid having our information sent all over the place.

Tom, whom I speak to on a semi-regular basis, has indicated that he and his team are working on even more enhancements to provide more value to his service in the future.

They are also working with industry partners to bundle their services and provide them as an option to a wider audience, who might want to a take a more private approach to preventing, or recovering from, identity theft.

I would highly recommend getting in touch with Truston if you are providing these services to your employees, or perhaps considering providing them to your customers.

Victims of identity theft are sometimes cautious about giving up their information after they've been victimized. MyTruston provides a viable solution for these customers, as well as, customers who are careful about protecting their privacy.

For the full announcement, which includes a free trial period for current customers on the paid services (you don't have to provide a credit card number, then remember to cancel)link, here.

I've noticed this is another neat marketing trick (requiring a credit card) employed by a lot of entities offering services for free lately. I suspect they count on busy and forgetful people like me, who forget to cancel the service.

PS: I got to know Tom from his blog and work as an advocate for identity theft victims. If you are interested in identity theft or privacy issues, I highly recommend you consider it as another free resource, he provides.