About 6 weeks ago, I broke up with my then boyfriend of a year or so. I probably should have left him months before, but I won't even get into all of that drama. Anyway, within a few days of us splitting up, I noticed there were 4 strange purcases on my credit card. I called the card company explaining the charges and they removed them without any issues. I got a call from them a week or so later to confirm some online purchases that looked suspicious.
They were not purchases I had made, so they took them off, cancelled that card and sent me a new one. At this point I hadn't even considered the possibility that it was my ex who had been using my card to buy shoes, clothes, camping gear, a whole bunch of stuff. Anyway I got the new card and figured there was nothing else to worry about. Just the other day I decided to pull a copy of my credit report and I couldn't believe it when I saw that there were inquiries from 2 car dealerships, all sorts of retail stores, presumably him trying to get store credit cards. Plus at least one inquiry from a mortgage company. It doesn't look like he was able to open any new accounts, thankfully, but it scared the heck out of me.
I know he knows my social security number, but he doesn't have any forms of my ID, that I can think of anyway. So to make a long story longer, I put a freeze on my credit, but I definitely want to set up a credit monitoring plan just to have as backup. I'm looking for any suggestions or thoughts that may help me make a good choice.
I'm seriously considering going with identity guard. I've been doing my homework and it has a lot of good features, plus it's not the most expensive one out there, which is nice.
This site gives it really good reviews, http://www.stopidentityfraud.org/credit-monitoring-services/ a bunch of other sites seem to give it good ratings as well.
I guess my second option would be to go with a free service like http://www.creditkarma.com or http://www.creditsesame..com. I don't know if either of those will cover as much as id guard, but the price is right so they're hard to not consider.
I've tried to track down my ex-boyfriend so I could get the police involved, but I haven't been able to find anything about where he's living now or if he's even in the same area. I guess I still don't have 100% proof it was him anyway. He better hope I never see him again, becasue that's not going to be a pretty scene. Sorry for all the details. Any help from the experts would be great.
