Aura Identity Theft Protection Review

Getting Started

We’ll look at how to purchase an Aura plan below, but first, let’s take a peek at the service’s pros and cons so you have some context.

Aura Pros and Cons

Right away, you’ll notice that Aura offers a huge list of features in several comprehensive protection packages. Plans include identity theft, protection from fraud, and complimentary antivirus software. Plus, Aura offers its own VPN so you can stay safe where you’re most at risk of identity theft – online.

We can’t ignore the list of cons, though. Aura is proud of its product, and it charges a premium for it. It also doesn’t offer a lot of choice when it comes to features. A number of other identity theft protection services offer cheaper versions of their plans for lower prices. Aura doesn’t skimp anywhere, which means there aren’t more affordable options. But, hey, you know you’re protected from any eventuality with Aura.

First Impressions

We were impressed by just how easy it was to navigate Aura’s website. A number of other identity theft companies we’ve reviewed could take a lesson. Browsing through the various packages and options was straightforward. That speaks well for the company’s organization and commitment to customer service.

We had a choice of three separate plans. The first, the individual plan, covers — you guessed it — individuals. There’s a couples plan that covers — wait for it — couples. Then there’s the family plan that covers — I think you see where we’re going — families. Uninspired naming conventions aside, these three plans cover all the possible options.

Things are a bit more complicated than this simple list suggests, though. In particular, you need to know that child identity protection differs from adult identity protection. Aura monitors kids’ Social Security numbers, but that’s it. To be fair, that’s the most targeted piece of information when it comes to minors. Very few kids have developed credit scores or wallets full of bank cards. We should also point out that you can add any number of children to the Family plan, provided that they live with you. There’s a five-member limit attached to the family plan, but that only applies to adults.

Aura’s Individual, Couple, Family, and Kids plans.

That doesn’t mean you have to get a Family plan if you have kids. That’s not practical if there’s only you and your spouse, or if you’re a single-parent. Aura recently added a new plan called Kids, which comes with parental controls and other digital security tools that can help protect them online. While it doesn’t come with SSN monitoring, it’s a great add-on for parents and households with kids but doesn’t have enough family members to fill the five-member family plan.

Aura Plans and Pricing

We provide more details later in our guide to Aura’s pricing packages, but a few quick notes here right off the bat.

As we mentioned earlier, Aura can be a bit pricey, but it’s not always about bottom-line cost. We prefer to think in terms of value, and Aura offers plenty of that. For instance, the family plan covers up to five adults. That’s a pretty healthy number and should be enough for most families. On top of that, you can protect an unlimited number of children’s Social Security Numbers as long as they’re part of your household. For reference, most identity protection services with family plans only cover two adults and a limited number of children, so if you’ve got a larger family, Aura can be a bargain.

Plus, Aura’s Family Plans come with some unique parental controls you won’t find with other ID theft services. The company’s recent purchase of Circle Parents means you can monitor what your children are up to online, filter out content, and set screen time limits.

Don’t have children? Aura offers some benefits for you as well. The company understands that identity theft is closely tied to our online behaviors, so it offers some extras that help. A VPN (Virtual Private Network) ensures you can’t be hacked, helping to secure your Personal Identifiable Information (PII). Meanwhile, antivirus software protects you from online scams and viruses, adding a further layer of protection to your identity.

And again, it’s about value, not price. Aura lets you protect up to 10 devices per user. That means if you’re on the Couple plan, you and your partner share a 20-device limit. If you’re on the Family plan, the number of devices you can protect depends on the number of registered users, not counting children. For example, 30 devices if there are three members, 40 devices for four members, and so on. We lead a pretty sophisticated digital existence, but even we can’t imagine needing more protection than that.

Aura: Purchasing and Setup

The purchasing process for Aura was a breeze. We selected the Individual plan, noting that Aura offers 24/7 customer support and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Then we went about setting up our account. 

Aura first asked us to provide our email address and to create a password for our account. Then, in our personal dashboard, we entered our personal information, such as our names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and birthdates. If you care about your privacy and it’s your first time using an ID theft protection service, providing that much personal information might make you anxious. But take it from us – none of that is unusual. These services need to know about you if they’re going to keep you safe.

Signing up for Aura

It’s only at this point that you’re asked to enter your credit card information. You’ve got a couple of choices in terms of payment plans. If you’re sure Aura is the right protection service for you, you can purchase an annual plan. That saves you some money in the long run, $36 a year with the Individual Plan and $216 a year with the Family Plan. Of course, it means paying the full price upfront, and that’s not for everyone. In addition, paying one month at a time allows you to test out the service and get comfortable with it before making a long-term commitment.

Once you’ve purchased your plan, you’ll move on to the easy setup process.

Aura’s Dashboard

Dashboard controls can be intimidating at first because they give you so much control. If you’re a novice at protecting your identity, you may not know the ins and outs of keeping yourself safe, and learning it can be overwhelming. Ultimately, though, the dashboard is refreshingly simple. Plus, you’re not alone. You have us to help guide you through all the options.

The first tile was our credit profile. This automatically configured itself based on the personal information we entered during the setup process, but it took a while for it to come online. We get it: Aura has to connect with the credit bureaus and compile a tremendous amount of information. Aura says the configuration can take up to a few hours. We’re not exactly oil barons, though. For us, it took more like half an hour. We clicked on ‘activate’ to start the setup process.

Aura started by asking us for information that only we would know, information specifically drawn from our credit file–things like past addresses and approximate payments we made to specific loans in our past. We liked that they were being cautious about verifying our identity. Once that process was complete, Aura officially activated our credit monitoring.

We were immediately impressed with Aura’s credit monitoring features. The company kept an eye on all three of our credit files – Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. Why do you need three? Because if an identity thief tries to take out a line of credit in your name, it might ping one service but not all of them.

Aside from keeping an eye on your credit, Aura also gives you the ability to lock it down. You should always keep this function engaged unless you’re actively applying for a loan or shopping around for a mortgage.

What is a credit lock? It essentially makes it impossible for a lender to access a credit file — in Aura’s case, your Experian file — when it’s engaged. This means a thief looking to open a line of credit in your name will immediately be stopped in their tracks. This is a really powerful tool against fraud, and one we recommend to everyone concerned about keeping their identity intact.

Aura also offers a credit score tracker, which shows your progress over time, and gives you information as to why your score is what it is. This is a great tool for anyone looking to re-establish their credit after a financial hardship or boost their credit to secure a loan at a lower interest rate.

Aura’s credit score tracker

The tracker is down at the bottom there. It doesn’t have any information in it yet, but after you use the service for a few months, you’ll see the dot move, plotting out your (hopefully) increasing score.

Moving on to the next tile, you’ll be able to link your accounts to Aura, which will then monitor them for suspicious activity, like large withdrawals or money being shuffled around. Aura uses Plaid — a third-party middleman which uses heavy-duty encryption to connect vendors to bank accounts — to connect to your accounts. We always like it when they show up; they’re extremely trustworthy.

Aura uses Plaid to connect to your financial accounts

Once we selected our bank and entered our username and password, we were ready to go. Once connected, Aura monitored all our connected accounts for transactions beyond a certain threshold that we set.

Setting Aura’s alert thresholds

Moving right along, the next section is all about identity monitoring. This covers everything from dark web marketplaces, public records, new accounts being opened using your information, and data broker sites. For that last one, Aura even offers to get your information removed from risky data broker sites, reducing your information’s exposure.

To monitor for your identity, Aura uses the information you provided during the sign-up phase, but you can always add more information later on. In fact, we recommend that you do. Aura can only monitor what it knows, so you have to make sure to give Aura all the pertinent details about yourself.

Additional information Aura can monitor

As an aside, we’ve reviewed a lot of these services, and this is one of the most extensive lists we’ve found so far. Well, we did find a comparable list during our IdentityGuard review, but it turns out that the same company that owns IdentityGuard owns Aura. Makes sense. Compare how similar they are with our Aura vs. Identity Guard guide.

The more important observation is that Aura’s identity monitoring absolutely works. We immediately had 23 notifications that our credentials were found on the dark web.

Alerts from Aura

If you have the same experience, though, don’t panic. We’ve reviewed dozens of identity theft protection services, and this is extremely common. Ninety-nine percent of the time the credentials won’t match up, or the alert was from such a long time ago that it’s nothing to worry about. Of course, while we appreciate Aura’s thoroughness, it would be nice if the company could filter out some of these results. It can be startling to have so many entries pop up.

Moving on, though, we want to highlight three of the most interesting and unique features Aura offers: malware protection, Wi-Fi security, and its most recent addition, a password manager.

Aura’s antivirus and VPN functions

Malware protection is essential antivirus software. What do viruses have to do with identity theft protection you might be asking yourself? The answer is “quite a lot.”

Malware comes in all shapes and sizes and can do anything from brick your computer to logging your keystrokes. Think about that for a second — if there’s a keylogger running in the background that you’re unaware of, it’ll be able to pick up everything you’re typing, including your passwords. Putting two and two together?

Good cybersecurity practices go hand in hand with identity theft protection. In our in-depth look at NortonLifeLock, we found they really get this, too. You always want to make sure you’re using strong passwords, avoiding sketchy sites, and being discerning about the online vendors you do business with.

We should note that you can’t get Aura’s malware protection if you’re using an iOS device. That seems short sighted. We get it: Apple platforms are more secure than other operating systems. It’s not foolproof, though. The fact is, quality malware detection is a must on every electronic device – Android, MacOS, iOS, even Linux systems.

Keep in mind that there are ways to have your identity stolen online. It isn’t just about viruses. Cybercriminals are adept at using social engineering – phishing, email attachments, malicious sites – to trick even the savviest consumers into giving up their personal information. Aura’s malware protection helps defend against these tricks.

Now let’s talk about this virtual private network Aura offers. What’s a VPN you ask? VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. A VPN allows you to log on to a remote server via an encrypted tunnel. The encryption ensure your data is safe and the remote server assigns you an anonymous IP address, so you can’t be tracked. Aura’s VPN is available on all major platforms: Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android.

We tested it on our iPhone, and it worked pretty well. There wasn’t a whole lot of latency — something you can expect when running a VPN — and it didn’t appear to be leaking DNS requests — a techno-jargon way of saying “it works.”

VPN test

Why would you want a VPN bundled with your identity theft protection? For the same reason it’s useful to package antivirus software with your identity theft protection. There is no magic bullet for keeping yourself safe from identity theft. There are tons of threats out there, and they all require different forms of protection.

If you travel, for instance, you know the dangers of sharing an unsecured hotel Wi-Fi network with dozens of guests staying in rooms all around you. You don’t know which of those guests might have checked in for the sole purpose of trolling for some identities. A stolen password can do enormous damage, and on standard Wi-Fi, you’re vulnerable. A VPN ensures no one knows you’re online and protects you at every point from snooping and hacks.

Finally, within the last several months, Aura has also added a password manager to its comprehensive list of extras. As we note in our guide to creating passwords, it’s a good idea to use different passwords for all your many accounts. That way, if a hacker should manage to figure out one password, they won’t be able to access all of your accounts. No one has the brain capacity to remember all those passwords, though, and writing them down on a notepad leaves them vulnerable should someone break into your home. A password manager lets you keep track of all your passwords in one secure location. You only have to remember the one password that unlocks the manager.

So that just about covers everything there is to say about Aura. With all this in mind, let’s put it all together.

Aura: Our Final Verdict

Overall, we loved Aura. Their credit protections are comprehensive, their identity monitoring is robust, and their bonus features — the malware protection and the VPN — put them head and shoulders above many other identity theft protection services we’ve reviewed so far.

Just as important as the features Aura offers, though, is the fact that the company makes it easy to control our own identity protection. The website and app are designed to feel sleek and modern, a stark contrast to most identity theft services, with dashboards that feel like they were rolled out circa 1995. We find that the easier it is to navigate a company’s pages, the more likely we are to make the right decisions with respect to our security.

Features and ease of use are a winning combination that puts Aura at the top of this industry.
That said, Not every service is right for every customer. Be sure you breeze through our guide to this year’s best ID theft prevention products before making your final choice.

Aura FAQs

*The score you receive with Aura is provided for educational purposes to help you understand your credit. It is calculated using the information contained in your TransUnion or Experian credit file. Lenders use many different credit scoring systems, and the score you receive with Aura is not the same score used by lenders to evaluate your credit.