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Does Cloaked Actually Work?
Cloaked first gained attention for its “Cloaked Identities” feature — a way to sign up for online services by using anonymized data (phone number, email address, etc.), so that your real personal data stays private in the event of a data breach.
Today, Cloaked bills itself as an all-in-one online safety platform that offers identity theft protection and insurance, data removal services, and digital security tools.
While Cloaked's expanded features sound good on paper, many don’t measure up in practice when compared to best-in-class alternatives.
If you’re considering signing up for Cloaked, it’s important to dig into the specifics of its coverage to make sure you know how it protects you (and where it might be leaving you vulnerable).
How Does Cloaked Work? Features, Pros, Cons, and Limitations
Cloaked is a hybrid data removal and online safety service that takes a “fix the past, protect the future” approach to privacy and security.
To “fix the past,” every Cloaked plan includes data broker removal from 120–140+ data broker websites (the number changes depending on where you look on Cloaked’s website) along with Dark Web and Social Security number (SSN) monitoring to help remove data that’s been leaked or spread online.
Cloaked then provides features to help proactively protect your data — including anonymised online identities, spam and robocall protection, and up to $1 million in identity theft insurance coverage.
But when you dig into the specifics of each feature, some clear limitations come to light. For data removal, Cloaked’s coverage of ~140+ brokers is smaller than most leading providers. And when it comes to identity theft protection, Cloaked barely scratches the surface by only monitoring your SSN, phone number, email address, and home address.
Here’s an overview of Cloaked’s key strengths and weaknesses:
Cloaked markets itself as an “all-in-one” provider, yet the depth of each of its services is quite limited when compared to more established brands and stand-alone tools. For example, Cloaked’s “identity theft protection” is really just an industry-standard $1 million insurance policy with no real protection features.
Zoom Out: Can Cloaked Really Keep Your Identity Private?
There are two issues with paying for a service like Cloaked:
- It’s expensive. Individual plans start at $12.49/month (when paid monthly) or $119.99/year (when you pay for a full year upfront).
- It may not always be as effective as it claims to be. Cloaked can’t help protect you from most of the ways in which your data can be used against you, such as phishing, hacking, and identity theft (aside from blocking some spam calls and providing insurance coverage for losses).
Cloaked Identities are a great way to keep your true contact information private in the future, but Cloaked isn’t the only company providing this service. Aura, for instance, includes unlimited email aliases with every plan. Tools like Addy and MySudo offer email and phone number aliases with many plans costing less than Cloaked.
It’s not that there isn’t value in what Cloaked offers. But its plans might be a bit oversold, especially when you consider some of the larger issues at play:
- There are hundreds, if not thousands, of active data brokers. According to PrivacyRights, there are over 750 data brokers in the United States alone. At best, Cloaked only covers ~140 of them, meaning your data will still be available online.
- Even when your data is removed, brokers often re-add it regularly. Services like Cloaked are stuck playing whack-a-mole with brokers that create duplicate profiles and continue posting your information.
- Data broker opt-out tools can’t help if your information was leaked in a data breach. Billions of pieces of data were leaked in the past year alone. Cloaked can warn you if some of your data was leaked, but its watch list is very limited when compared to services like Aura that monitor over 130 pieces of personal information.
- Americans lost $12.8 billion to fraud and identity theft last year. Cloaked can help block spam calls, but it won’t monitor your financial accounts or your credit for signs of fraud.
The bottom line: Cloaked helps you mask your contact details, remove some data from the internet, and warns you if certain sensitive information is leaked — but it comes up short on proactively protecting you from how your leaked data can be used against you.
How Much Does Cloaked Cost?
Cloaked offers a single plan with the option to protect multiple people at a small per-plan discount. Couple plans cover you and one other person, while family plans cover you and three other members.
Cloaked’s annual plans are advertised per monthly cost, but you’re required to pay the full amount upfront. (This is a standard practice across the industry.)
Here's a rundown of Cloaked's pricing as of January 2026:
Cloaked doesn’t offer a free trial, but you can sign up for a free personalized risk report and then upgrade to Cloaked’s data removal plan. Plans include a 30-day money-back guarantee. For the most up-to-date pricing information, check out Cloaked's official website.
What Are the Benefits of Using Cloaked?
Cloaked promises to clean up data that’s already circulating among data broker providers and give you anonymized contact details to use when you sign up for accounts or interact with others online.
Here are some of the other main advantages of using Cloaked:
“Cloaked identities” keep your details private online
Cloaked lets you generate unlimited unique phone numbers and email addresses that you can use when signing up for new accounts, free trials, and newsletters, shopping online, or just exchanging personal information with people you don’t know well.
Using aliases makes it much harder for scammers or data brokers to link your activity across platforms — each online interaction points to a different set of contact information.
Easy online alias setup and management
You can create a new alias with just a few clicks and label it within the Cloaked app for its specific use. Cloaked will collect all the texts, emails, and calls sent to your identities so that you can view them all in one place.
If an alias starts to receive spam, you can just delete it. There’s no disruption to your actual phone number or inbox.
One Cloaked user on third-party review platform Trustpilot wrote:
“The dashboard is easy to navigate, and the alias emails and phone numbers are honestly a game-changer. I’ve started using them when signing up for anything new, and it feels good knowing I can just shut one down if it starts leaking spam.”
Dark Web and SSN monitoring
Cloaked’s app tracks your SSN, phone number, email address, and home address across the internet, including the Dark Web. If any of that data shows up as a result of a breach or leak, you’ll get an alert so you can reset your passwords and update your security settings.
Onboarding and identity theft support
When you sign up for Cloaked, you can schedule a live onboarding session with an identity theft expert who can help you configure Cloaked settings to reduce future risk. For user experience issues or other questions, you can contact a U.S.-based customer support team via email or chat.
If something worse happens (like identity theft), Cloaked offers 24/7 access to specialists who can help you restore your identity and limit further damage to your credit and reputation.
$1 million identity theft insurance
All of Cloaked’s plans come with up to $1 million in identity theft insurance, provided by American International Group, Inc. (AIG). If you become the victim of identity theft, Cloaked’s identity theft insurance policy covers:
- Lost wages of up to $2,000 per week for a maximum of five weeks
- Travel expenses of $1,000 per policy period
- Elder care, spousal care, and child care of $2,000 per policy period
- Certified public accountant costs of $1,000 per policy period
- Legal fees and private investigator fees subject to prior approval of the insurer
Note: Cloaked’s website mentions that identity theft coverage is limited to users in the United States and may not be available in all jurisdictions.
What Are the Downsides of Using Cloaked?
One of Cloaked’s major downsides is its “jack of all trades” model. On paper, it covers multiple angles of online privacy, but its features don’t always hold up in practice.
Some of the key downsides of using Cloaked include:
Low number of data brokers covered
Compared to other popular data broker removal services, Cloaked covers a lesser number of sites and provides fewer options for removing your personal data from online sources.
For example, depending on where you look on Cloaked’s website, the company advertises coverage of between 120–140+ data brokers. That’s a far cry from services like Aura, Incogni, DeleteMe, Optery and others that cover anywhere from ~200–800+ data broker sites.
Some reviewers have also complained about the effectiveness of Cloaked’s data removal services. On the Google Play store, for instance, a Cloaked user wrote:
“I keep following Cloaked's instructions to remove my data from about five data brokers, and the brokers aren't doing it. There's got to be a better way. That's what I'm paying Cloaked to do.”
Limited Dark Web monitoring
Cloaked’s Dark Web monitoring is a newer feature that scans the Dark Web for your SSN, phone number, email address, and home address. While this is a good start, other services have built their reputations on providing robust identity theft protection and monitoring across multiple vectors — including public records, court records, data breaches, and more.
For example, Aura tracks your home and auto titles, passport number, credit and debit cards, banking details, passwords, and more — and notifies you if your information is leaked or being used for high-risk transactions like payday loans.
No financial fraud protection or monitoring
Cloaked doesn’t have any credit card or bank account monitoring features. It also lacks other core financial safeguards that other all-in-one services provide, like three-bureau credit monitoring, 401(k) and investment account monitoring, and instant credit locks that can help you detect suspicious activity as soon as it happens (and thereby limit the fallout).
Missing device security features
Cloaked offers a VPN and password manager, but its device security functionality stops there. Other services offer antivirus protection, Safe Browsing, and secure digital vaults to guard against malware, phishing sites, and hackers who are hoping to steal sensitive files or credentials.
Mixed results for Call Guard spam blocker
Cloaked’s Call Guard feature uses AI to screen calls for known spam, telemarketer, and robocall numbers — and silence them. This cuts down on interruptions; but more importantly, it decreases the chances that you’ll pick up a malicious call. This is a useful feature because whenever you do pick up a malicious call, it signals to scammers that your number is active and worth targeting again.
As one customer wrote: “The volume of spam calls has decreased, and the ones that come in are silenced, so my phone is not constantly ringing! Customer service is pretty thorough.”
However, not all users have had the same experience. According to another Cloaked customer on Trustpilot:
“Calls haven't slowed down at all! Still receiving several robocalls daily at all hours of the day and night!”
Another user wrote: “I bought this for my husband and me, and both of us immediately started getting more scam calls and texts.”
Call Guard is still a fairly new feature and these mixed reviews suggest it may not work consistently for every carrier or phone setup.
Reports of poor customer service and a difficult cancellation process
Cloaked only offers email and chat support with limited hours for reaching a human agent. Outside of these hours, you’re referred to an AI-powered chatbot.
Unfortunately, some customers on both Trustpilot and Reddit have complained about difficulty in reaching a human customer support agent — which is especially frustrating because this is a requirement if you want to request a refund.
One user on Reddit wrote: “I went to cancel after a $230 charge hit my card yesterday but can’t reach a live person.”
On Trustpilot, a user wrote: “I’ve been trying to get help setting up my account for 24 days, and their support team shows zero urgency.”
Cloaked vs. Aura: Which One Is Better?
While Cloaked bills itself as an all-in-one service, Aura has been awarded the best comprehensive identity protection solution by tech reviewers and household-name publications for years.
CNET named Aura its 2025 Editor’s Choice for best identity theft protection, and Security.org awarded Aura “Best Comprehensive Protection” for data removal services.
Both Cloaked and Aura take an all-in-one approach to data broker removal and online security, but they offer vastly different features.
Cloaked excels at creating aliases and masking your online information. Aura takes these features and pairs them with stronger data removal tools, robust identity theft protection, credit monitoring, digital security, and more.
Here’s a deeper look at how Aura and Cloaked compare head-to-head:
The bottom line: Aura provides true “all-in-one” protection against modern threats. Cloaked takes a novel approach to hiding your data when you sign up for services in the future. But its limited data broker removal services and online privacy tools mean you’ll still be at risk. Aura understands this and provides superior protection for your identity, finances, and accounts.
The Bottom Line: Aura Protects You in Ways That Cloaked Can’t
Cloaked tries to cover a lot of ground as part data broker removal tool, part privacy tool, part security tool. While each aspect of the platform does some of the job, none of Cloaked’s features go deep enough to offer the level of protection most people need.
Aura gives you and your loved ones a more complete safety net. In addition to data broker removal, all Aura plans include award-winning identity theft protection, three-bureau credit monitoring, instant credit lock, cleanup of unused digital accounts, and Safe Browsing tools.
Plus, you get access to 24/7 U.S.-based support and generous identity theft insurance for greater peace of mind.
