If you use your debit or credit card regularly, it may not take long before you have hundreds of transactions in your account history. Can you remember what each of those charges is from?
It's important to review your statements regularly, but it's not fun and it's easy to miss small mistakes -- especially when the dollar amount is small. Knowing this, some thieves steal small amounts from you every month or even less often. They can make a nice living if they tap into enough accounts.
BillGuard is a service that promises to catch these fraudulent charges and alert you to other money-wasters. Your transactions are analyzed using fraud-detection software, and also compared against other customers' account histories. If something looks funny, the transaction is color coded to grab your attention, and you can help the software learn what's legit and what's not.
Your bank already uses fraud-detection software, but it may miss a few things. For example, recurring charges from a notoriously shady company (that aren't fraudulent charges) may drain a few bucks from your account each month. BillGuard hopes to shine a light on those for you. In addition, BillGuard combines data and insight from customers at a variety of banks -- so ideally it'll be smarter than any one bank's software program.
The service is free for one card, and $4 per month for unlimited card monitoring.
[via NetBanker.com]
Actually, BillGuard is free for all users with an unlimited number of cards.
Sam’s right — BillGuard is now free for as many cards as you want.