Combatting identity theft requires users to monitor their data online, set secure passwords, and prevent malware on their devices. Sounds overwhelming? Consider getting McAfee Identity Theft Protection, a full-fledged service that does everything mentioned above and more.
We put McAfee Identity Theft Protection’s different features to the test. Here’s an overview of its important features:
- Identity Theft Monitoring and Alerts: McAfee monitors several kinds of personal information and sends alerts if any such information is leaked in a data breach.
- Up to $2 million in insurance: If you fall victim to identity theft, McAfee will help you recover stolen personal information and provide up to $2 million.
- Robust security and privacy tools: McAfee provides a VPN, password manager, and antivirus software in addition to identity monitoring.
- Technical and operational support: If you run into any problems with McAfee’s tools, you can contact its knowledgeable support staff via phone, chat, or social media.
The above features make McAfee Identity Theft Protection a great overall tool to secure your identity online, especially at a reasonable starting price of $39.99/year.
Read our full McAfee Identity Theft Protection review for more details on the its different features, price points, and drawbacks!
With hackers developing new ways to obtain and misuse personal information, using a robust ID protection service is more important than ever.
McAfee Identity Theft Protection monitors different kinds of personal information and then alerts you if your information appears in online leaks. It also offers sizeable insurance against such crimes and helps you reclaim leaked personal information.
This article reviews McAfee’s identity theft protection service, which is included in its Total Protection and McAfee Plus plans. We also tested its other tools and features, such as the antivirus software, virtual private network (VPN), and password manager.
McAfee Identity Theft Protection: Mini Review
McAfee is best known for its antivirus solutions, which help keep different devices malware-free. Now, it’s also forayed into the realm of identity protection by offering useful information and breach monitoring tools in its subscription plans.
Specifically, its “Total Protection” and “McAfee Plus” plans include an array of identity protection features, including credit card and personal information monitoring, data breach alerts, identity restoration, and up to $2 million in identity theft insurance.
We recommend McAfee Identity Protection if you:
- Want robust identity monitoring and alerts at an affordable price
- Require a holisitc security suite
- Want to try out an identity monitoring service for 30 days for free
We don't recommend McAfee Identity Protection if you:
- Require prompt and effective customer support
- Need address change or postal service monitoring
McAfee offers solid identity protection services that help most people counter identity theft. However, it lacks some advanced scanning and monitoring options, such as address change monitoring, that the leading identity theft services offer.
Still, the McAfee Plus and Total Protection plans feature a virtual private network (VPN), password manager, and antivirus software. Combining these tools and features ensures holistic security for all your devices. Get all these features and more for just $39.99/month!
What Does McAfee Identity Protection Do?
McAfee’s identity protection features cover all the essentials you’d expect from such an offering. It also uses AI-based monitoring and detection to ensure personal information leaks are found and dealt with quickly. We explain McAfee’s different identity protection offerings below:
- Identity theft monitoring: McAfee’s identity protection service scans your email and social media accounts, credit cards, bank accounts, and tax IDs to check for potential leaks. If leaked information is detected, it alerts users instantly, prompting them to take corrective action.
- Identity recovery assistance and insurance up to $2 million: If your personal information has already been breached, McAfee can help restore compromised accounts. It’ll also cover any expenses you incur towards recovering and restoring stolen information up to $2 million.
- Data cleanup services: McAfee Plus gives users several useful tools to manage their personal information online. This includes the Personal Data Cleanup feature, which helps remove personal information from data brokers, and the Social Privacy Manager, which enhances your privacy protection on social media websites like Facebook and LinkedIn.
- Holistic privacy and security: In addition to the identity theft protection features, McAfee’s bundles include antivirus software, VPN, and password manager, which help keep you safe online.
Let’s dive into McAfee Identity Theft Protection’s key features and pricing.
Pricing
McAfee offers five different plans, with individual and family options for each. The identity theft protection features vary considerably from one plan to another, making it quite confusing to select the right one for you.
The following table provides a breakdown of these different plans and the identity theft protection features they include.
| Features | Total Protection Essential | McAfee+ Premium | McAfee+ Advanced | McAfee+Ultimate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | $39.99/year | $49.99/year | $89.99/year | $199.99/year |
| Antivirus | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| VPN | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Web Protection | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Password Manager | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Identity Monitoring and Alerts | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Bank and credit card transaction monitoring | ✖ | ✖ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Bureau Credit Monitoring | ✖ | ✖ | 1 bureau | 3 bureaus |
| 401 (k) Investment Monitoring | ✖ | ✖ | ✖ | ✔ |
| Personal Data Cleanup | ✖ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Social Privacy Manager | ✖ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Online Account Cleanup | ✖ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Insurance Coverage | ✖ | ✖ | Up to $1 million | Up to $2 million |
McAfee offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on all plans, so you can try it out before picking one you like. In our view, McAfee+ Premium hits the sweet spot between the abundance of features and affordability.
If you’re particularly concerned about your identity being misused, the Advanced and Ultimate plans offer additional services, such as 401(k) investment monitoring and insurance coverage against identity theft.
Another benefit of the more expensive plans is that McAfee will help remove personal data collected by brokers and resolve data breaches on your behalf. Other plans will only alert you that your information has been breached.
Note:
Some McAfee Identity Theft Protection features are only available if you opt for auto-renewal of your subscription. For instance, the VPN is only accessible if you sign up for auto-renewal. Similarly, the social security number and health ID monitoring services are only available once auto-renewal is turned on.
Features
In this section, we take a closer look at the different tools and features McAfee Identity Theft Protection offers. We begin by examining its monitoring and alert services before going over the antivirus scanner, VPN, and password manager.
Monitoring and Alerts
McAfee’s Identity Theft Protection service monitors a range of personal information that can be leaked online. The following table explains the nature and scope of information that McAfee scans for and monitors.
| Feature | Details |
|---|---|
| Dark Web Monitoring | McAfee Identity Theft Protection monitors the dark web for more than 60 types of information, including your email ID, bank accounts, passport details, and national IDs. |
| Bank Account and Credit Card Monitoring | Cybercriminals typically steal personal information to access a user’s bank accounts and credit cards. McAfee monitors your bank accounts and credit card statements for potentially fraudulent activity. |
| Credit Bureau Monitoring | McAfee provides monthly updates and alerts for unauthorized activity detected in your transactions by one of three major US credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion). This helps ensure that hackers don’t obtain loans using your personal information. |
| 401(k), Investment, and Loan Transaction Monitoring | In addition to monitoring your bank accounts and credit cards, McAfee’s Identity Theft Protection service also keeps an eye out on your loans and investment accounts. |
Overall, McAfee monitors several important kinds of personal information and provides timely alerts if a breach is detected. However, unlike Aura and Norton LifeLock, it does not offer address change monitoring or wallet theft protection.
Additional identity and privacy safeguards
While identity theft monitoring is McAfee Identity Theft Protection’s key offering, it also includes various other features that help protect your identity and privacy. These include:
- Identity theft coverage and insurance: Preventing identity theft is virtually impossible. Therefore, a good identity theft protection service should offer technical and financial support if you’re a victim of identity theft. McAfee offers expert assistance that helps recover and restore stolen information and up to $2 million in insurance for any losses from identity theft.
- Lost wallet protection: Our wallets contain much more than just money; we have our IDs, driver’s licenses, and credit cards. McAfee will help you block and replace stolen IDs and credit cards if your wallet is stolen.
- Social privacy manager: Managing privacy settings on social media websites can be complex. With McAfee Identity Theft Protection, you can easily navigate privacy settings on different websites, ensuring your data can’t be stolen from there.
- Personal data cleanup: Data brokers are websites that assimilate users’ information and sell it to advertisers. You can identify which brokers have collected your information and request that they remove it using McAfee.
- Online account cleanup: We tend to forget that our old email and social media accounts can contain potentially valuable personal information. McAfee monitors these accounts and alerts you if they’re still holding on to personal information.
- Security freeze: McAfee helps ensure that hackers can’t misuse your financial and other accounts by temporarily suspending them if a breach has occurred. It also prevents the creation of new unauthorized accounts.
Antivirus software
McAfee is one of the oldest and most famous antivirus scanners. While it’s no longer one of the best antivirus software available, it still does a great job of protecting your devices from viruses and ransomware.
Since the antivirus is included in the Total Protection and McAfee Plus plans, we tested it out as part of this review. The downloadable antivirus app lets you scan your device and configure your firewall, which prevents viruses and other malware from entering your device.
We ran a few scans to check McAfee’s speed and detection ability. The full scan took a fair while to complete and strained our device’s performance, though it was thorough and complete.
VPN
A VPN is a useful privacy tool as it encrypts your online activity and prevents prying eyes online from snooping. Like many other cybersecurity companies, McAfee has developed its own VPN.
The VPN is included in all the subscription plans discussed earlier in the article, though it isn’t available on macOS.
McAfee’s VPN protects your online activity but does not match up with leading providers like NordVPN. For instance, it does not disclose the encryption protocol it uses to protect user data. Its server network is also relatively small when compared with leading providers.
For holistic VPN protection, we’d recommend getting a NordVPN subscription. If you opt for NordVPN’s complete plan, you can get an antivirus, password manager, and other identity theft protection features.
Password manager
Creating strong passwords and storing them securely is a great way of preventing identity theft. McAfee’s Identity Theft Protection service includes a password manager extension called True Key that helps create and store strong passwords for your different accounts.
The password manager extension was easy to use and set up, though Safari doesn’t have an extension. After creating an account, you’re shown a landing page from where you can add login details for different accounts, including popular social media websites.
In addition to storing and generating strong passwords, True Key lets you store other important and sensitive information, such as your driver’s license, social security number, and passport details.
WebAdvisor
Another useful feature in McAfee’s security suite is WebAdvisor, which helps you avoid malicious and harmful websites. Additionally, Web Advisor identifies and alerts you to phishing attempts and also scans your downloads before the start.
WebAdvisor is available as a standalone Windows program and as an extension for Chrome and Firefox. We tested the Edge extension on our Mac and found it worked seamlessly. It prevented us from opening a potentially harmful webpage and explained why access had been blocked.
Usability
Ease of use is a key parameter for any identity protection service. If the service is too complex, customers may be unable to use it effectively. Luckily, this is not the case with McAfee Identity Theft Protection, which is well-designed and intuitive.
The McAfee website is easy to navigate, and signing up for one of its plans didn’t take too long. However, figuring out how plans differ from one another can be a challenge.
After subscribing to one of McAfee’s plans, you can download McAfee’s different programs. We received a download link for the antivirus and other products in our mail immediately after signing up, which streamlined the setup process considerably.
McAfee’s identity protection services are available through a web-based dashboard that can be accessed after logging into the website. You can check data breaches, add additional accounts to monitor, and use the Social Media Manager and Online Data Cleanup features from the dashboard.
We particularly like McAfee’s Protection Score, which gives an overview of your online identity security. It’s a composite score based on the different identity protection measures you’ve taken. For instance, our Protection Score increased once we resolved one of the breaches McAfee identified.
The other services included in McAfee’s bundle can be downloaded separately. While the VPN, antivirus, and firewall are combined in one bundle, the password manager and Web Advisor must be installed separately, which can be quite cumbersome. However, each application took no more than a few minutes to set up, and each one is easy to use.
Customer service
Customers may encounter problems when navigating an identity protection service, which makes a knowledgeable and prompt customer support team very important. McAfee offers customers several ways to resolve problems, including community forums and a customer service hotline.
The community forums and blogs are informative and cover some common issues users face when using an identity protection service, such as cancellation, renewal, and setting up the software. Since McAfee’s identity monitoring service is relatively new, the discussion forums are only sparsely populated.
If you don’t find what you’re looking for in the forums, you can launch McAfee’s virtual assistant, which provides relevant information on various security and privacy issues. Moreover, you can use Chatbot to contact a human support agent if you don’t get the desired answers.
We used this feature to cancel our subscription and get a full refund, in keeping with McAfee’s 30-day money-back guarantee.
Other options for contacting customers include calling a helpline number or using social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
McAfee Identity Theft Protection vs. Competitors
There are now several identity protection services on the market, making it difficult for users to decide which one suits their needs.
Using our extensive experience in reviewing identity theft protection services, we’ve created the following table, which compares McAfee with other leading service providers, such as Aura and Norton LifeLock.
| Features | McAfee Identity Theft Protection | Norton Lifelock | Aura |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dark Web Monitoring | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Bank Account and Credit Card Monitoring | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Three-bureau Credit Monitoring | ✔ (Only with the Ultimate Plan) | ✔ | ✔ |
| USPS Address Change Monitoring | ✖ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Child Identity Protection | ✖ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Insurance Coverage | Up to $3 million | Up to $3 million | Up to $5 million |
| Money-back Guarantee | 30 days | 30 days | 60 days |
| Pricing | Starts from $49.99/year for McAfee+ Premium | Starts from $7.50/month | Starts from $12/month |
| Download Link | Get Up to 73% Off on McAfee | Get Up to 42% Off on LifeLock | Get a 53% Discount on Aura |
The above table makes it clear that McAfee aims to provide a relatively low-cost identity monitoring service that covers users’ basic monitoring requirements. McAfee+ Premium, which is the cheapest McAfee Plus plan, costs just around $3.33/month, which is considerably less than Aura’s monthly starting price of $12.
However, the lower price does come with some drawbacks. For instance, McAfee does not offer address change monitoring or specific tools to manage a child’s identity. Despite this, McAfee is a reasonably priced and effective identity theft protection service, especially for first-time users.
How to Set up McAfee Identity Theft Protection
This section walks you through setting up identity theft protection using McAfee Identity Theft Protection. It first explains how to sign up and download McAfee before guiding you through the identity monitoring setup process.
Downloading and installing McAfee Identity Theft Protection
- Go to the McAfee website and select the plan you want to subscribe to. We recommend the McAfee Plus plans, as they offer more identity theft protection features.
- Input your email and select your preferred payment method. McAfee supports different credit cards and PayPal.
- Download McAfee’s software using the link you receive in the mail after confirming your subscription.
- Install the McAfee application as you would any other standard application. McAfee’s VPN and firewall may require extra permissions, which you will be prompted to accept. If your device only supports McAfee’s web-based identity protection service, like our Mac, then you will need to navigate to its web-based dashboard.
- Click on the “Protection Center” button to navigate to McAfee’s identity protection service web app.
Downloading and installing McAfee is quite straightforward, though we would have preferred if the identity services could be managed from the same app that houses the antivirus and VPN.
Setting up identity theft monitoring
Now that we’ve signed up for McAfee’s identity protection service, let’s understand how you can start monitoring personal information.
- McAfee immediately starts monitoring your email ID for dark web leaks without any setup. During our testing, we received an email saying our email ID was accounted for in a few breaches.
- Navigate to the McAfee identity protection dashboard.
- Click on the “Add Info” button. This will open up a fresh webpage from which you can add information, such as your passport details and driver’s license.
- To monitor if the information you’ve added has been stolen, click the “See what was stolen” button on the ID theft protection dashboard. On this page, you can review which leaks your data has appeared in and how to recover them. If you’ve signed up for a McAfee Plus plan, you can seek expert assistance to recover your data.
Final Thoughts: McAfee Identity Theft Protection Review
McAfee offers a robust identity theft monitoring and protection service that combines personal information monitoring with a VPN, password manager, and antivirus scanner to ensure holistic security. It also offers identity theft restoration support and covers costs up to $2 million.
We highly recommend getting McAfee Identity Theft Protection if you’re a first-time user of identity protection services because of its relatively low price and 30-day money-back guarantee.
Learn more about protecting your identity and privacy online by reading some of our other articles:
- What Does Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) Know About You?
- How to Browse the Internet Anonymously
- Best Browsers with Built-In VPN: The Ultimate Guide
Check out the most commonly asked questions about McAfee Identity Theft Protection below. If we’ve missed any important questions, let us know in the comments.
Yes, McAfee offers a robust identity theft protection service that monitors personal information to identify potential breaches.
It also offers insurance of up to $2 million if you’re a victim of identity theft. The identity theft protection service is complemented by a VPN, password manager, and antivirus software.
McAfee’s identity theft protection works by scanning known online databases, especially on the dark web, to check if your personal information has appeared in them. If it finds a match, the user is alerted and prompted to take corrective action.
Yes, McAfee Total Protection lets you monitor up to 10 email addresses. If you opt for automatic renewal, you can also monitor other kinds of information, such as health records.
