It’s a good question, and the answer is yes… but with some caveats.

Identity theft is one of the curses of the internet age. Put simply, it’s a problem that’s only going to grow, as the 21^st century marches on.

But if you’re concerned or worried about making sure the only person using your identity and your sensitive financial information is you… you might be wondering about the best way to go about protecting your identity from criminals and hackers.

Essentially, you have Two Options

The first is to try and look after it all yourself, and the second is to pay for an ID protection service.

The good news is that both work.

The bad news is that taking a DIY approach can be time consuming and frustrating. Yes, you can save yourself some cash and review your credit reports and check all your financial statements with a magnifying glass yourself, but the learning curve is pretty steep, and the chances are you’ll never know what you might be missing…

The second option is of course to pay for a service to take care of all the headaches for you. However, the important thing about using a third-party service, and like the first option above, is to make sure you do your research first.

If you don’t, you could end up paying for a product that not only doesn’t do a good pro-active job of safeguarding your identity, but also makes your valuable personal information even more open and vulnerable than it already is. There’s no point buying an alarm for your house if you never turn it on.

Essentially, when you go out shopping for identity theft protection, you need to compare what these companies will cost, against what they protect. In many ways it’s like shopping for insurance, and while it’s tempting to always just renew with the same guys as before, it always pays to get out there and compare the market.

The most important aspect in choosing identity theft protection is to make sure and choose a reputable company. Take some time, do some research. Don’t just take the company’s website at face value. Read identity theft protection reviews, and look into the small print so that you get a good idea of what the company does and doesn’t protect against.

Of course, it’s also really important that you realize, that no matter what option you choose, you will always be vulnerable to some extent. No service can 100% ever absolutely protect you no matter what option you choose, from becoming an identity theft victim.

But you shouldn’t panic too much if this does happen to you, because a good identity theft protection service can get you back on your feet a whole lot faster than you probably could yourself, depending of course, on who you’ve chosen to protect your identity. A decent service should at least offer a basic level of assistance in resolving issues for you should the worst come to pass.

In conclusion, the best thing you can do to protect yourself from identity theft, is to learn how and why it happens in the first place.

If you know how it all happens, it’s easier to take more effective measures to prevent yourself from becoming a victim. Although this type of theft cannot always be prevented, every pro-active step you take in helping to further protect yourself turns you into a much smaller, and much harder target to hit.