Experian is one of the three leading credit bureaus in the United States today. Their new Dark Web scanning product is a great tool but was missing one very important detail. That's why we have to rank this service as #2 behind TruthFinder.
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To test Experian's Dark Web scan I went ahead and used an email address that I knew had been compromised in the past. I wanted to see if Experian would correctly find it and display the same information that TruthFinder had shown me. Experian is a HUGE name but size doesn't always equate to quality. After the recent Equifax hack, I'm a little weary of these credit bureaus having so much of my information.
When I first landed on the site I was greeted with a straight forward interface (pictured above) asking me to input an email address. Easy enough.
After entering my email Experian started to scan the dark web and told me it was scanning million so data points. I was a little confused at what exactly it was scanning for at this point but I assumed I'd find out later on.
I was sort of expecting to see some indication at this point about the status of my email address. I went ahead and checked my email as recommended by the page but didn't find anything. I ended up waiting about 12 hours for the email to finally show up.
After the email finally arrived and I was sent to my report, Experian was able to confirm that my email address had indeed been compromised. This wasn't a surprise to me since I had previously tested this email out with another Dark Web scanning service but there was one difference that I noticed. According to Experian, my password had NOT been leaked, this was the opposite of what other Dark Web scanning services told me. This really makes me question the accuracy of their reports and is why we recommend using TruthFinder's Dark Web scanning service instead.
In addition to Dark Web monitoring you also get access to a credit report and a few other features
Dark Web activity is constant. While you can easily change your passwords when you hear about a big data breach on the news (equifax, yahoo, adobe, etc.), most breaches go unreported for months and in some cases are never reported as the companies usually don't want anyone to know that they've been hacked. That's why constant and continuous monitoring is so important.
| Identity Works Premium Pricing | |
|---|---|
| 1 Month | $19.99 |
Experian's Identity Works Premium membership costs $19.99 per month and includes a whole slew of credit related services. Personally, most of these were not very useful as my credit card offers these services for free but they were a nice added benefit.
Experian's Dark Web monitoring service was able to locate my compromised email address and for $19.99 you get a boat load of included credit related features like credit scores and reports. However, the fact that it did not notify me that my email password has been leaked was a bit worrisome. All in all, it's a solid service for the price but I'd rather spend $8 more and get the personal background report and the correct status of my password.
