Let me give you my personal identity theft protection checklist—and why “just freeze your credit” is a myth that leaves a lot of holes. Identity theft is getting more sophisticated year over year, and the cleanup is brutal (on average, people spend around 200 hours untangling these incidents). In this video, I break down what good identity theft protection should actually look like: fast credit monitoring alerts, real dark web scanning that finds exposures, data broker removal, and support that can act quickly when something goes wrong. Here at Cyber Sleuth, we don’t just repeat marketing claims. My team signed up for the major services, ran real credit checks, tested alert speed, called customer support, and even pulled in broader feedback (like Reddit) to see what holds up in the real world. What we found is that most services either specialize in one narrow feature or hide basics behind higher tiers—LifeLock is a good example, where three-bureau monitoring isn’t on the basic plan. Aura is the one that got universal praise from my testers. It hits everything on my checklist in the standard package, and it does it better—especially credit monitoring speed (I’ve seen Aura alert me faster than Experian during a freeze/unfreeze), stronger dark web findings in our tests, improved data broker removal (now 140+ sites), and US-based 24/7 live support.