Discover Identity Theft Protection Review 2024: Simple and Affordable Family Protection

We recommend Discover Identity Theft Protection if you’re a Discover customer and want an identity protection solution for your family. Starting at $15.00/mo, you receive up to $1 million in identity theft insurance for you and up to 10 children.

You need a Discover account to enroll in this service, so it might not make sense if you don’t want to become a Discover customer.

Let’s explore Discover Identity Theft Protection to see if this is the right identity monitoring solution for you.

Discover Identity Theft Protection review at a glance

We think Discover Identity Theft Protection makes sense if you’re a Discover customer and want a service that includes child identity protection at a low cost. Within the base price of $15 a month, you receive family-plan coverage for yourself and up to 10 children.

Discover Identity Theft Protection has only one subscription plan, which makes it easy. The plan covers up to 11 people (1 adult and 10 children). You can also add another adult to the plan through your online account for an additional $15.00/mo.

The singular Discover Identity Theft Protection plan provides up to $1 million in identity theft insurance, which is about the minimum most identity protection services offer. For example, here’s what you can find from some alternative service providers:

• Norton LifeLock: Up to $1.05 million in coverage on the LifeLock Standard plan for one adult.
• Identity Guard: Up to $1 million in coverage on the Value individual plan.
• Aura: Up to $1 million in coverage on the Individual plan.

To help determine if ID theft protection is worth it, consider whether a service provides the benefits you want. For example, Discover Identity Theft Protection provides credit monitoring, financial account monitoring, Social Security number alerts, dark web alerts, address change alerts, and more.

Discover Identity Theft Protection pros and cons

What does Discover Identity Theft Protection protect against?

Discover Identity Theft Protection can help protect you against these identity theft situations:

• Identity theft: Discover can help protect you from identity theft losses by monitoring your credit, Social Security number (SSN), address changes, the dark web, alternative loans, and criminal court public records.
• Child identity theft: You can add up to 10 children (under 18) to your account at no additional charge. Discover monitors the dark web and provides SSN alerts for added children to help prevent child identity theft. Any child you add is covered by the identity theft insurance and receives access to full-service resolution.
• Financial fraud: Discover also monitors whether your personal information has been used to apply for or open a new bank account, or if one of your existing bank accounts has undergone changes. You can add up to 10 existing bank accounts for monitoring, up to 10 credit or debit cards, and up to 10 store or retail credit cards for monitoring.

Discover Identity Theft Protection features

Discover Identity Theft Protection’s highlights include three-bureau credit notifications and financial account monitoring. It’s also helpful that Discover will monitor address changes, alternative loans, criminal court records, and your personal information on the dark web.

In general, it doesn’t seem like Discover Identity Theft Protection is much different than other identity protection services. That’s a good thing, since you want these types of services to hit all the main points, such as credit and identity monitoring.

But if you’re looking for anything additional on top of what most services offer, you likely won’t find it with Discover Identity Theft Protection.

What features does Discover Identity Theft Protection come with?

Credit monitoring

Discover Identity Theft Protection monitors your Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax credit reports daily for signs of potential activity from identity thieves. Discover sends you an alert if it finds a match for its searches, which could include new credit account openings and credit inquiries.

You can read about any alerts in the “Credit Alerts” section of your online dashboard.

If you receive an alert and you don’t recognize the activity on your credit report, Discover recommends calling its Fraud Resolution team at 1-800-347-3089. Even if you don’t think you’ve become a victim of identity theft or a scam, it’s likely worth checking out for your own peace of mind.

Insurance coverage typically comes into effect if you report a legitimate Stolen Identity Event and file a successful claim for eligible costs, which could include (with certain limits):

• Lost wages
• Travel expenses
• Elder care, spousal care, and child care
• Certified Public Accountant costs
• Investigative agency or private investigator costs
• Legal defense fees and expenses
• Costs involved with unauthorized electronic fund transfers

In general, the insurance policy could provide reimbursement for a number of costs related to personal expenses and stolen funds through unauthorized means.

Credit reports and credit scores

Discover Identity Theft Protection provides you with one full copy of your Experian credit report when you enroll in the service. You won’t receive another copy of your Experian credit report from Discover, but you can access a credit snapshot of your report whenever you want. The snapshot shows a summary of activity on your report every 30 days.

Note that Discover doesn’t provide you with credit reports from Equifax or TransUnion. You can always request a free copy of each of your reports from annualcreditreport.com once every 12 months.

We had issues accessing our credit snapshot soon after signing up for the service. We would only see the message that “Your credit snapshot is not available. Please try again later.”

Fortunately, Discover cardholders can check their FICO Credit Scorecard whenever they want from their online account. This gives you a snapshot of your total credit accounts, length of credit history, recent inquiries, revolving credit utilization, and missed payments.

You can also see your most recent FICO score and your FICO score history, giving you a look at how your score has changed in the last year or so. This could be helpful if you want to know why your score may have dropped or gone up, as the scorecard tells you about key factors affecting your score.

Financial account monitoring

Discover automatically starts monitoring your personal information related to new bank accounts after you set up your account. You then have the option to add existing financial accounts for monitoring.

That includes adding up to 10 credit or debit cards, up to 10 bank accounts, and up to 10 store or retail credit cards.

Any accounts you manually add are monitored on the dark web for matches. Keep in mind that you typically can’t change whether information shows up on the dark web or not. Meaning, if one of your credit cards shows up on the dark web, it’s likely there forever.

But knowing an account is on the dark web means you can take action to cancel that account and have a new account issued.

Identity monitoring and alerts

Discover Identity Theft Protection provides loads of monitoring and alert features, including:

• Dark web monitoring: Alerts you to any instances of your SSN or other provided personal information found on the dark web.
• Personal information monitoring: You can manually add personal information for Discover to monitor on the dark web. This includes email addresses, phone numbers, financial accounts, your driver’s license, your passport, and medical IDs.
• Financial account monitoring: Alerts you to any instances of someone trying to use your personal information to open a new bank account. You can also manually add existing bank accounts, credit cards, debit cards, and retail store cards for monitoring on the dark web and to receive additional fraud alerts.
• Criminal court record monitoring: Alerts you if your name appears in federal, state, or municipal records for arrests, court bookings, and more.
• Address change monitoring: Alerts you if there’s any change of address activity associated with your address in the USPS National Change of Address database.
• Alternative loan monitoring: Alerts you if there’s any alternative lending activity associated with your personal information. That could include activity with installment loans, payday loans, auto loans, lines of credit, title loans, credit cards, and more.

Note that we received an alternative loan alerts report after enrolling in Discover Identity Theft Protection. The report didn’t find any matches for alternative loan activity, and it let us know we’d be alerted of any matches in the future.

We also received two other reports after enrollment that we were able to view upon signing in to our online account. This included a Social Security identity alerts report and a dark website monitoring alerts report.

We found that our Social Security number was associated with different aliases and addresses, which all looked correct to us. We also found some of our personal information was compromised on the dark web, including a phone number and email address.

There’s not much you can do to remove your information from the dark web, but you can at least use these reports to help protect yourself from identity theft. For example, the dark web report showed that our email password was found along with our email address.

This type of information should prompt you to immediately change your password and put safeguards in place to protect your account from data breaches that will eventually happen. That could include using a password manager to stay organized and using two-factor authentication or something similar to improve your account security.

Our experience with Discover Identity Theft Protection

We had no issues enrolling in Discover Identity Theft Protection and accessing the dashboard through our online account. Note that we were already a Discover customer with a Discover card, which helped streamline the process. You can’t sign up for Discover Identity Theft Protection without a Discover account.

If anything, the only confusing part about using the service was finding out where the identity protection services information was in your Discover account. Since I was logging in with my Discover credit card account information, I wasn’t sure where to find the Discover Identity Theft Protection area.

But I eventually found it under the “Security” tab labeled “Identity Theft Protection.”

From here, we could access the Identity Theft Protection dashboard, including credit monitoring, personal information monitoring, and child identity protection.

Note that you have to provide personal information to sign up, but this is true of every identity monitoring service.

For Discover Identity Theft Protection, that included providing our name, Social Security number, email address, and phone number. You can also manually add more information for monitoring, such as more phone numbers and email addresses, in your online account.

Overall, we had no real issues using Discover Identity Theft Protection. It provides the different types of monitoring features we would want, including credit and different types of identity monitoring. And it was simple to integrate this new service with our existing Discover account.

The main drawback is that you only get a credit report from Experian (not TransUnion or Equifax), and that’s a one-time benefit. It would be nice if you were able to receive information about the other credit bureaus and continue to receive full credit reports every once in a while.

Does Discover Identity Theft Protection keep your data safe?

We looked through the Discover Identity Theft Protection consumer privacy statement, and it doesn’t seem like Discover does anything out of the ordinary when it comes to sharing your personal information.

In general, Discover can share your data for everyday business purposes, marketing purposes, and joint marketing purposes with other financial companies. Discover doesn’t share your personal information for affiliates’ and nonaffiliates’ everyday business purposes or for them to market to you.

Also, all identity protection services require some of your information, including your Social Security number and full name. That’s because these types of services need this information to be able to monitor potential identity theft situations.

For example, Discover needs your Social Security number to know if someone is trying to open a bank or credit card account in your name. Without your SSN, Discover and other services would have a much harder time trying to monitor for identity theft events.

Yes, it feels counterintuitive to share your personal information with yet another entity. After all, we already put a lot of data out there. But that’s how identity theft protection services work.

Fortunately, Discover appears to share your personal information only for standard things you can expect from most similar services. That could include processing transactions, maintaining your account, and offering you products and services through marketing means.

The consumer privacy statement says that Discover can continue sharing your information (as described in the notice) even if you’re no longer a Discover customer. We find that concerning. But you can contact Discover at any time to limit how your information is shared. Discover offers this number for questions: 1-800-347-7552.

Keep in mind that Discover doesn’t provide any sort of two-factor or multi-factor authentication if you’re logging in to your account from a web browser. It’s a bit baffling that a major U.S. financial institution doesn’t have this common security feature, but at least you can use facial recognition if you’re using a compatible device with the Discover mobile app.

Discover Identity Theft Protection compatibility

Discover Identity Theft Protection doesn’t have its own mobile app. You can access the Identity Theft Protection dashboard through your Discover online account on a web browser or through the Discover mobile app.

The Discover Mobile iOS app in the App Store has a 4.9 out of 5 rating with over 4.2 million ratings and reviews.

The Discover Mobile Android app on Google Play has a 4.6 out of 5 rating with over 280,000 ratings and over 10 million downloads.

Of course, these ratings are for the Discover Mobile apps in general, but they give you an idea of how well-received the apps are. And from our experience, it was easy accessing the Identity Theft Protection services using the Discover Mobile iOS app on an iPhone.

Discover Identity Theft Protection customer support

You can contact Discover Identity Theft Protection customer support by calling 1-800-347-3089. Specialists are available to help from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. CT Monday through Saturday, and 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. CT on Sundays.

There’s no other option to contact customer support unless you’re contacting the general Discover support team, which might not help answer your questions.

Discover also doesn’t provide much information about how its identity protection services work or why you might want to sign up in the first place.

The most information we could find about Discover Identity Theft Protection was in our account after we had already signed up, which isn’t helpful if you’re trying to research the product before signing up.

But in your online account, you can find a series of FAQs in different areas that provide helpful answers to common questions.

Discover Identity Theft Protection prices and subscriptions

Discover Identity Theft Protection costs $15.00/mo for one adult and up to 10 children. If you want to add another adult, it’s another $15.00/mo for a total of $30 monthly. This pricing is similar to what you can find with other popular identity protection products:

• Norton LifeLock: Costs between $7.50–$38.99/mo for first yr for annual plans.
• Identity Guard: Costs between $7.50–$33.33/mo for annual plans.
• Aura: Costs between $9.00–$30.00/mo for annual plans.
• IdentityIQ: Costs between $5.94–$25.50/mo for annual plans.
• IDShield: Costs between $14.95–$34.95/mo.

All of these services start at a lower price than Discover Identity Theft Protection, but most of these starting prices are for individuals. Since Discover also includes up to 10 children, it could be quite a deal if you’re looking for child identity theft protection.

Also, the majority of the above pricing applies if you pay on an annual basis. With Discover, you pay monthly, so you aren’t locked in for a full year. You can also cancel at any time and receive a prorated refund.

Discover Identity Theft Protection price

Discover Identity Theft Protection FAQs

Bottom line: Is Discover Identity Theft Protection good?

We think Discover Identity Theft Protection makes sense if you’re already a Discover customer and also want a child identity protection solution. You won’t find too many services that provide identity theft protection for one adult and up to 10 children for $15.00/mo.

It’s also nice that you pay on a monthly basis and can cancel whenever you want. So if you no longer need the service, just cancel and get a prorated refund for any unused time. If you aren’t a Discover customer, consider Norton LifeLock, our top recommended identity theft protection service.

For tips and tricks on how to protect yourself against identity theft, check out our identity theft protection and credit monitoring guide.

3.6

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Discover Identity Theft Protection

• Identity theft protection service that provides up to $1 million in coverage
• Can protect 1 adult and up to 10 children with its base price
• You must be a Discover customer to enroll

Author Details

Ben Walker

About the Author

Ben Walker is a writer at All About Cookies with a passion for all things internet and technology, whether it's using VPNs while away from home or organizing his life with password managers.