I have been a loyal customer of MyFICO for over 10 years. I still have access to my very first Quarterly Monitoring report on 5/19/2004.
If you are familiar with the product, you get 4 TransUnion FICO scores and daily monitoring for changes to your personal information. Explicitly the MyFICO advertises that they check daily for new accounts and recent applications for credit. Weekly I get a very assuring e-mail stating that all is well:
| FICO® QUARTERLY MONITORING |
 |
| STATUS: ALL CLEAR |
Dear XXXXXXXXXX, Good news! We did not find any changes in your personal identity information this week. |
I've looked back in my e-mail and I have literally gotten hundreds of these exact messages. It is all very reassuring.
Now here is the problem, since my last score and credit report on 5/17/2014 I have had 6 hard credit pulls and 3 new accounts opened totalling over $250k in new credit extended.
My weekly monitoring e-mail from MyFICO still says they haven't found any changes and all is clear! In fact, the last time the weekly e-mail said something was potentially wrong in my account was in September of 2013.
I want to know what I've been paying for?!?! MyFICO's daily monitoring has done me no good at all.
How did I see all of this? Credit Karma...for free. On top of that, as the credit pulls continue to come in, I get daily alerts (actual, useful alerts) as to balance changes, new accounts, and credit pulls.
MyFICO continues to tell me all is clear (latest e-mail was this morning) as Credit Karma has sent me 20 useful alerts in the last 6 weeks. Why is the service I am paying for doing none of this?
A frustrated MyFICO user.
Starting Score: 687 - 5/19/04
I don't subscribe to ScoreWatch, I subscribe to the Quarterly Monitoring which is based on TU.
@pizzadude wrote:
Do you know for certain that the new accounts / inquries are showing on Equifax? Scorewatch only looks at EQ. Credit Karma is TU.
Directly copied from the MyFICO site under the FICO Quarterly Monitoring description:
Personal Identity Data Monitoring
Protect your identity
11.6 million Americans are affected by identity theft annually. To reduce your potential exposure to identity theft, we
conduct daily monitoring of online sources where social security number, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers
could be found, traded or sold. Alerts are provided for the purpose of giving you an early notification when a change is
detected on your personal identity data.
Here is a summary of the data sources monitored for information tied to your identity:
- Publicly recorded changes to name, date of birth, or social security number
- Newly listed addresses, phone numbers and employers
- Newly opened accounts and recent applications for new credit
- Newly listed public records, such as bankruptcies, foreclosures, and tax liens
- Newly listed collection company records
@TheFate wrote:I would call first thing in the morning and find out whats going on thats unacceptable
Oh, I have. All I have gotten is the run around. They started with "We only monitor for identity theft on a daily basis with the Quarterly Monitoring". Where I pointed them directly to their own marketing materials on MyFico.com that states that the service monitors daily for "Newly opened accounts and recent applications for new credit". In addition to a lot of other things.
What else could be bigger to monitor for detecting identity theft than hard pulls on your credit and new accounts?!?! The CSR pointed me to changes that showed up on my quarterly report that is over 2 months old as proof that they are detecting the changes. I asked her if she thought that once every 3 months equated to daily monitoring? She did finally agree that something wasn't right.
All MyFICO customer service has said is they will escalate the issue to upper management. I'm waiting on a call back.
No worries pizzadude 
Yeah, I hope they get it fixed too. I'm a long-time user of the service (since May 2004) and while I like it and have suggested it to many others, this isn't good as I'm primarily concerned that I've had this false sense of security by getting weekly assurances that I'm being monitored and all is well. I've looked back through my weekly "All Clear" messages back 5 years and there have only been a few times anything has been flagged. What has been flagged has normally been new addresses, but they're also false positives because it's just permutations and misspellings of my actual address.
I hope that MyFICO has a reasonable explanation for all of the missed monitoring. If not, I'm not sure I can ever trust the monitoring again.
So the wait continues. I have only had two other issues over 10 years where I needed to contact Customer Service (other than to change my credit card number). The first one was way back in 2004 to resolve a FICO discrepancy between my bank and MyFICO back when they advertised that MyFICO was the one and only real FICO score. While true, we also now know that there's a king-sized bucket of different versions of a FICO score. The next issue involved my FICO score not changing for 9 months. In both cases, while I had to contact customer service time after time to get the issue resolved, they did seem to show genuine concern and would call me back in something reasonably close to 48 hours.
Apparently the 3rd time isn't a charm for me.
The experience on this issue is markedly different. When I called again today, because the 48 hour window was well blown, I was greeted by a rather unfriendly woman with a condesending tone. She more or less scolding me I didn't subscribe to a service that did daily monitoring and I'd have to wait until my next quarterly score to get information. Then she started selling me on subscribing to ScoreWatch if I wanted daily monitoring. I asked her to stop selling me on a different product and read her the quote directly from their own website:
Provide peace of mind
We are monitoring your identity information daily and will send you immediate alerts via wireless text message when a change is detected on your personal identity data.
We’re monitoring your identity information daily and your FICO® Score and credit report quarterly. Reduce your exposure to identity theft with immediate alerts via mobile text message when a change is detected.
- E-mail alerts when changes in public information are detected
- Archive of past alerts
- Checklist to help you review your credit report for signs of ID theft
- Option to receive weekly E-mail updates whether changes are detected or not
- Simple and easy-to-use
- Secure, instant online access
- Alerts interpretation guide
To this she had no answer and started repeating that I apparently wanted ScoreWatch. I don't need daily monitoring of my score, but I thought I was paying for daily monitoring of identity theft. I again asked her to answer what the daily monitoring and weekly monitoring messages were monitoring. She then became very abrupt and said Quarterly Monitoriing only provided information quarterly, that she had explained it to me already, and that if I wasn't satisfied and thought she didn't know her own products I could wait on hold and have her supervisor tell me the exact same thing.
Well then, isn't that nice. They won't answer WHAT they monitor daily and demand they have answered the question. i asked what happened to the previous escallation that they were supposed to call me back on Monday and she said that her supervisor would explain it. Of course after about 20 mminutes on the phone, the supervisor is tied up. They'll call me back in 24-48 hours again...maybe. Well, so much for their customer service.
Methinks it may be time to stop patronizing MyFICO.