In this article, we’ll go over the main aspects of an identity protection benefit and how it can help protect employees from identity theft, scams, viruses, and financial damage, as well as protect their personal devices and their families.
As the digital realm expands, so do the threats associated with it—phishing, identity theft, scams, and more. To protect employees from these threats, employers are providing education and cybersecurity solutions that can keep them at bay.
And to help protect employees when they’re on and off the clock, employers are offering an identity protection benefit. But how exactly does an identity protection benefit work? Is it credit monitoring? Is it insurance for identity theft? Does it protect personal devices? Does it protect from scams?
The answer is that identity protection can provide all these things—and more—to those that enroll.
What you get with an identity protection benefit
Protection from identity thieves is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what an identity protection benefit can offer. This includes:
Monitors the accounts thieves and hackers like to target
An identity protection benefit is often the first line of defense against identity thieves and digital criminals. Imagine this: You’re unwinding at home after work when your phone buzzes with an alert—a new credit line has been opened in your name. But you haven’t applied for anything. Your heart sinks as you realize that your identity has been stolen.
By monitoring credit scores and providing updates when changes are detected, an identity protection benefit helps users detect unusual activity as quickly as possible and helps stop digital criminals from causing further damage. Some identity protection benefits also monitor an employee’s non-credit accounts, such as debit cards, credit cards, bank accounts, health savings accounts, and more.
This includes high-risk transaction monitoring and financial transaction monitoring across these accounts, sending users an alert whenever unusual activity is detected. From there, users can verify the activity or report it, giving them the tools they need to prevent further damage and protect their accounts. By monitoring a wide range of accounts, users can detect identity theft attempts as quickly as possible, regardless of where it happens.
Locks down your data and reduces your digital footprint
Personal data, including browsing histories, usernames, passwords, addresses, and emails, is constantly being collected by vendors, data brokers, and other entities every time your employees use the internet. And as the number of organizations that have access to their information increases, so does the likelihood that their data will be exposed in a data breach when one of those organizations is hacked. An identity protection benefit can help employees manage and protect their data privacy with several different tools, including:
Digital footprint manager, which shows employees the companies and organizations that have access to their data, including what kind of data they have on file
Data removal tool that automatically monitors which data brokers have access to their data and requesting that it be removed, reducing the likelihood that their data will be sold to criminals or exposed in a data breach.
Dark web monitoring, which searches the dark web for an employee’s personal credentials like usernames and passwords and alerts them when that information is detected, it empowers employees to change their credentials before a hacker can use them in an attack.
Restores your finances, accounts, and credit ratings
One of the huge frustrations for identity theft victims is getting their lives and finances in order after the crime is committed. It can take hundreds of hours over several months to get everything back to normal.
That’s why it’s important for both your company’s productivity and the employee’s peace of mind that an identity theft benefit helps smooth out and simplify the process.
Requesting fraud alerts and credit freezes, filing an identity theft report at IdentityTheft.gov, contacting each company (in writing) where fraudulent transactions occurred, alerting local law enforcement when applicable, following up with all those loose ends… these are all areas where an identity theft protection program can take the pressure off the employee.
An identity protection benefit can reduce the complexity of these tasks by allowing employees to easily address them with the ability to lock their credit or dispute a transaction within the benefit portal. It also significantly simplifies the recovery effort by assigning a team of restoration specialists to handle the restoration effort from start to finish. During the process, employees should also able to easily monitor the process of their case and have a single point of contact that they can reach out to if they have any questions or concerns.
Proactive protection from scams
When it comes to scams, digital criminals are endlessly creative and extremely persistent. And while some scams are easy to recognize, others are incredibly difficult to detect, fooling even the savviest internet users. In fact, over $20 billion was lost to scams in 2024 alone.
An identity protection benefit can help protect your employees from scams with an arsenal of different tools and features. This includes tools that scan emails and notifications for malicious links containing malware, automatic blocking of calls and texts from scammers, and the ability to report scams and have them taken down.
The right identity protection benefit will also provide users with critical educational resources to help them detect and identify scams, as well as give them updates on the latest scams. And should your employee become a victim of a scam, an identity protection benefit can also offer coverage to help them recover the money lost to scammers.
Device protection and digital safety for the whole family
As our gateway to the digital world, our devices are a favorite target for hackers, scammers, and other digital criminals. These devices often contain precious information that digital criminals can use in their schemes and gain access to bank accounts, social media profiles, and more.
And worse yet, children can also be a target of these criminals as they are prone to extortion attempts like sextortion. And with an endless number of dangerous and inappropriate sites, it can be difficult to ensure the digital safety of kids and regulate how they use their devices.
An identity protection benefit can include vital cybersecurity tools such as anti-virus protection, phishing and malware protection, a firewall, and more. Not only can an identity protection benefit protect your devices from viruses, but it may also protect your children while they’re online with tools like web filtering, parental monitoring and alerting, location tracking, and more.
Helps get your money back with insurance coverage
While identity theft recovery can be tedious and time consuming, the financial implications are often far more serious. In addition to funds stolen, there might be out-of-pocket costs including legal fees, record request fees, and even fees associated with pulling additional credit report fees. There may also be lost wages, childcare costs, and tax challenges to solve.
When an employee experiences an identity theft incident, an identity protection benefit can help them easily recover these costs with coverage for a wide range of costs associated with identity theft, including covering funds that have been stolen by identity thieves. This coverage also covers several different types of identity theft, including home title fraud, deceased family member identity theft, and more.
Prevent, minimize, recover: identity theft protection that works
An identity protection benefit does more than just monitor for signs of identity theft—it provides proactive protection against identity fraud and scams, minimizes the damage that scam artists and identity thieves can cause, and transforms the recovery process from a time-consuming nightmare into an easy and straightforward process.
To learn more about identity protection benefits and how they can not only protect employees, but also reduce corporate risk, visit our Business Hub.
