Complete ID Identity Theft Protection Review

Editor’s Note: Complete ID is no longer open for enrollment. While it may reopen in the future, only existing members can access the service as of the time of writing. However, we are keeping this pricing guide up to help current Complete ID users decide if they should hang on to their subscription once it expires or go with other alternatives.

As much as we love our modern technology, life was a lot simpler when you didn’t have to worry about foreign hackers stealing your Social Security number, using it to open a credit card and racking up thousands of dollars in bills, all without your knowledge. Identity theft is such a problem that even retail companies have rolled out programs to prevent it.

One of those retailers is Costco and its Complete ID program. You might be skeptical about an identity theft program from a company that sells paper towels in bulk and Kirkland jeans. But Complete ID is backed by the major credit bureau Experian, which means it’s legit.

Complete ID and Experian

After combing through all of the resources on the Complete ID homepage and using the service for a few days, we have found that it’s another great Costco bargain. In fact, Complete ID has features similar to those from top identity theft programs like Identity Guard and LifeLock. Let’s take a look at what we liked, and didn’t like.

Complete ID Plans and Pricing

It’s important to note that Costco isn’t in the identity theft business, per se. Complete ID just is one of the products that the retailer sells. Therefore, you shouldn’t expect a comprehensive offering like some of our top picks mentioned above.

In particular, there aren’t different tiers of packages for Complete ID. The service is only available as a singular suite of identity theft protection services. The cost of the service is based on the level of your Costco membership.

At last check, for Executive Members, Complete ID cost $8.99 per month; for Gold Star and Business + members, it was $13.99 per month. Either way — it’s pretty reasonable considering what you get. And if you want a more detailed description, have a look at our Complete ID pricing breakdown here.

It’s worth pointing out a basic Costco membership is $65 annually. So doing the math, we found the real cost of a membership was a little more than $18 per month. If you’re never going to use your Costco membership for anything but access to Complete ID, you might consider other feature-packed options in that price range. But if you’re a Costco regular, this is one of the cheaper ID theft protection services we’ve seen.

Complete ID Pricing

Complete ID Features

Also worth noting, Complete ID offered child protection at $2.99 for up to five children for executive members and $3.99 for Gold Star or Business+ members. If you’re interested in protecting your little ones, check out our guide.

Some of these services are pretty standard fare, but there were a few items on the list that caught our attention. Fortunately, we managed to get a subscription before Costco stopped offering Complete ID. Let’s take a look at what our subscription entailed.

Complete ID and Costco

The Day-to-Day of Complete ID

So there are definitely similar design elements here to IDnotify (another identity protection service powered by Experian), but it’s not a one-to-one translation. The most prominent features with Complete ID are the notifications window, our credit score update graph, and our dark web surveillance tool.

Complete ID Notifications, Updates, and Surveillance

Before we got into that, though, we wanted to make sure we had everything completely set up — particularly because we hadn’t received any initial notifications. When that happens, we always get a little concerned — we know from our use of other services that there are things to flag, so when a service turns up nothing, it can indicate issues with functionality or that the set up is incomplete.

One of the first immediately actionable items we saw was something called the Identity Status Check.

Complete ID Identity Status Check

This is apparently a “comprehensive data check” to “establish and confirm” our identity status. That’s something new to us and sounds pretty interesting, but we were unfortunately unable to access it, as it was unable to load.

Not a great look, particularly for something that’s so prominent on our dashboard. But, Complete ID has a lot more to offer. We decided to check out some of the other functionality and hoped this was just a hiccup. But unfortunately, each time we came back to it, we could never get it to work.

At the top of the page we found a navigation bar that helped orient us.

Complete ID Navigation Bar

Home is the Dashboard, so we moved on to the Credit Center. Here again, we had a feeling that we’d been here before — this section was identical to IDnotify. We have a feeling we’re going to be repeating that a lot if we keep pointing it out, so we’re going to leave it at that. Just note that a lot of this service is a mirror, so if you’re not a Costco member but you’re interested in these functions, it’s available under a different name.

In this section, we were really impressed with the detail of the monitoring. While we can’t show you everything, we were able to navigate through detailed reports that included:

• Personal information
• Consumer statements
• Credit inquiries
• Revolving credit accounts
• Line of credit accounts
• Real estate credit accounts
• Installment credit accounts
• Open accounts
• Collection accounts
• Other accounts
• Derogatory information
• Public records
• Creditor contact information

Phew. That’s a lot to go through, but we appreciate how thorough the service is. Also worth pointing out, Complete ID is monitoring all three credit bureaus here, so if there’s a discrepancy it’s sure to pop up.

A quick note on three-bureau credit monitoring, though. Some services will try and convince you that single-bureau monitoring is sufficient, or that credit monitoring as a whole isn’t a worthwhile endeavor because once you receive an alert, the damage has been done.3

We respectfully disagree. While this is a bit of an oversimplification, that’s like saying you only need a security camera on your front door — the garage and back door are probably fine. Or that you don’t need a security camera at all, because if someone’s breaking in it’s already too late. Is three-bureau credit monitoring a silver bullet? No, but we think it’s in your best interest to keep an eye on things. And the more bureaus, the better.

VantageScore Update

So next up in the Complete ID navigation was our VantageScore Update. Before we take a look at this, it’s important to understand what VantageScore is and what it’s not.

There are three major credit reporting agencies: Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax. These are also called the three major “bureaus.” They maintain a record of your credit history, which is also called a “credit file.” Credit scores are based on the information in your credit file at the time it is requested. There are a few different ways to calculate a credit score, and VantageScore is one of them.

VantageScore is not the end-all, be-all of credit scoring. While it’s certainly one of the most popular, there are numerous different models lenders can use to determine creditworthiness.4

So with that understood, using this tool we were able to track our three-bureau VantageScore annually, and our Experian VantageScore month to month.

Complete ID Credit Monitoring

This is a really helpful tool for someone looking to improve their credit score or monitor how certain behaviors affect their scores over time. We would have liked to see Complete ID take it a step further and offer a credit score simulator as IdentityForce does, but this is handy in its own right.

Identity Protection

Next up on the navigation bar is Identity Protection. Here, a sub-menu drops down with access to the different elements of this service:

Complete ID Features

Each one of these is a sub-menu with detailed information regarding what exactly is being monitored and why. We were happy to find that no notifications popped up anywhere, and we appreciate how in-depth these resources go. We also felt pretty confident in how complete the protections are, but we did want to point out the Neighborhood Watch function.

Neighborhood Watch

This is Complete ID’s take on sex offender monitoring. And to be honest, we just don’t think it works. It says the function will notify us of sex offenders in our area, and if new ones should move in. We didn’t have any notifications here, but through using other services we know there are at least a handful within a 5-mile radius.

Complete ID Notifications

That’s unfortunate because these can be helpful tools to help make decisions for families such as school choices and recreation areas, but we’re just not confident how trustworthy this particular function is.

Identity Restoration

Next in the navigation was the Identity Restoration Tab. There’s not much to do here, but it does summarize Complete ID’s services should we suspect we’ve become the victim of identity theft.

Two things to note: First, they offer the industry standard $1 million, $0 deductible insurance policy most services offer. This is important in covering lost wages, attorney fees, and expenses that might be incurred for re-filing loans and other lines of credit. Identity theft can be very costly, and it’s important to use a service that can help in this way.

Second: Should identity theft be confirmed, Complete ID will assign a dedicated specialist to our case. While we’ve luckily never had to go through this process, it’s safe to assume bouncing back between one caseworker to another and waiting on hold would be frustrating — to say the least. Complete ID resolves that by having one point of contact from incident to resolution.

Alerts and Monitoring

Now that we’ve seen Complete ID’s features, it’s time to take a look at their alerts and reports. After a while, two popped up for us: Our SSN Monitoring report and our Dark Web Surveillance Report. Let’s start with the former.

Social Security Numbers are one of the most common pieces of information stolen by identity thieves. They use these numbers to set up aliases and open lines of credit in an individual’s name, then welch on the bill. Usually, the victim is none the wiser until a collections agency contacts them or their credit gets dinged. By monitoring our social security number, though, we’re able to see what names have been associated with it and where.

Thankfully, all of the alerts in this report looked fine. We recognized our name on each, the locations were all places we’ve lived, and the instances were all over three years old. What you really want to look out for here are recent notifications, names you don’t recognize, and locations you’ve never lived.

It was a similar story with our Dark Web Surveillance Report. Here’s the sensitive information that Complete ID monitors on the dark web.

Complete ID Monitored Information

The Dark Web is a section of the Internet that isn’t indexed by search engines and is only accessible using specific technologies. It’s home to all sorts of nefarious activity, and more likely than not your information is there in some form or fashion. Don’t worry, though, that doesn’t mean you’re the victim of identity theft.

If you were like us, you’ll have some compromised email address notifications here, or maybe even a compromised password or two. If these notifications are old and you’ve changed your passwords since then, there’s not much to worry about. Just keep an eye out for recent notifications, or notifications that more important information has been found like bank accounts and credit cards.

One final thing to note here — we really liked that Complete ID gave us suggestions of actions to take regarding each alert. This is a really helpful feature, particularly if a notification is important enough to merit action.

So that’s about it on the desktop platform. One final thing to point out, though. If you spend enough time using Complete ID, you’ll inevitably be logged out due to a session expiring at a certain point. This can get a little annoying — we think the timeout limit is a bit too short — but we do appreciate this functionality from a security standpoint.

Complete ID Timeout Warning

This is a portal into our most sensitive information, and if we happened to leave it up with wandering eyes around, it could do some damage. We also appreciated the two-factor authentication built into the sign-in process — this helps ensure it’s really us accessing our dashboard and not someone else.

So now that we’ve gone through each feature of the desktop experience, it’s time to take a look at Complete ID’s mobile platform.

Complete ID: The App

Remember how we said we liked Complete ID’s two-factor authentication? Well, that’s only when it works. When we were trying to set up the app, we couldn’t get the text message for the code to complete the login. Frustrating, but once we had it emailed to us we were in.

Unfortunately, what we found was a little lack-luster. Similar to services like it, this app is just a mobile version of the website.

Complete ID Financial Services

It’s not a dealbreaker, but we always like it when these services take the time to consider the user experience on a mobile device as much as they prioritize the desktop experience. Does it get the job done? Sure. But we think Complete ID missed an opportunity here.

Final Thoughts on Complete ID

Despite some shortcomings with some of the functionality and with the underwhelming nature of the app, we were happy to find a fully built out and complete service.

If you’re already a Costcore regular, we’d definitely recommend keeping your Complete ID subscription. But, as we pointed out earlier, it’s a lot similar to IDnotify. So if you’re new to identity protection and you liked what you saw here from Complete ID, but can’t buy a subscription now, IDnotify would be a great alternative. That said, we know there are better services out there. Check out our list of top-rated identity theft protection services, where we named Aura, LifeLock, and Identity Guard as the top options.

Complete ID FAQs