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Credit report monitoring is the monitoring of your credit history in order to detect any suspicious activity or change in your credit history. Companies offer such service on a subscription basis, typically granting you: regular access to your credit history, alerts of critical changes to your credit history, and additional services. Credit monitoring can help you detect credit related fraud and identity theft. One of the more popular firms is Freecreditreport.com, best known for its humorous commercials featuring a singer who, because of his failure to monitor his credit rating, finds himself in embarrassing situations (such as being forced to buy a used subcompact, the only car he could afford on his poor rating).

In the U.S. whenever obtaining your credit history, or credit monitoring, such services are typically available either as 1-Bureau service (with data access to only one of the 3 national credit reporting bureaus), or 3-Bureau service (with access to data to all 3 national credit reporting bureaus). It is often advisable to see data with all 3 bureaus (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion) to detect identity theft.

Companies providing credit monitoring will typically alert you to important activity such as credit inquiries, public records, delinquencies, negative information, employment changes, new accounts and other changes to your credit history. Most people get little benefit from paying for regular credit reporting such as that available from FreeCreditReport.Com.^[1]

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