just realized a bunch of credit card companies are actually giving away free identity protection stuff and i had no idea. like, american express has this service called my credit guide where you can check your credit score and get alerts if anything sketchy happens on your report. not even just for amex cardholders either, anyone can use it.

capital one does something similar with creditwise - you get weekly score updates and they literally check if your ssn is floating around on the dark web which is kind of wild. chase has credit journey which does basically the same thing but also alerts you if your data gets breached. all of these are free btw.

even discover has their credit scorecard where you can monitor your experian report for free. i guess the idea is these credit cards with identity theft protection are trying to make sure you don't get screwed over by fraud. honestly seems like a no-brainer if you're worried about identity theft.

what's crazy is how many people probably don't know about these tools. like you don't even need to be a customer to use most of them. if you're thinking about getting a new credit card, might be worth checking which ones offer the best identity theft protection features since they're all free anyway. anyone else using any of these services?