Thanks to the ever-increasing number of scammers and spammers, responding to a phone call or email from an unknown sender can be quite intimidating. Personally, I treat any unexpected call with a healthy dose of suspicion.
Deepfakes and AI-driven scam calls make it harder to parse malicious messages from real messages. And with more than half of Americans affected by fraud in 2025, it’s more important than ever to secure your lines of communication.
Enter Surfshark: As our Surfshark review notes, it comes with a suite of tools to help you avoid scams and spam while protecting your online identity.
Plus, we have an exclusive offer that gives you $10, $20, or $30 in Amazon gift cards when you sign up for Surfshark Starter, Surfshark One, or Surfshark One+.
In addition to offering the typical functions of a VPN – accessing content in other countries and improving browsing privacy – Surfshark is equipped with a full suite of security tools that cover everything from calls to emails to ad blocking.
Surfshark Starter is currently available for $1.99 per month with a 27-month plan (paid upfront at $53.73, which is 24 months plus 3 additional). This represents a savings of 87% compared to the monthly cost, which totals $417.15 over the same period.
Surfshark One and Surfshark One+ increase the price to $2.49 per month and $4.19 per month, respectively, when purchased as 27-month plans. Surfshark One adds a web content blocker and antivirus, while Surfshark One Plus offers web data deletion via Incogni and up to $1 million in identity theft coverage.
All three Surfshark plans let you connect to as many devices as you want, a huge win over competitors like ExpressVPN.
As mentioned, all three tiers of Surfshark come with a selection of excellent security tools. As our Surfshark VPN review notes, Starter is far from a “lite” version of the Surfshark experience, with full VPN, ad blocking, and identity protection features. Keep reading for the full breakdown.
Alternative identity
Alternative Identity is the generic term used by Surfshark for its identity protection tools.
Essentially, Surfshark allows you to present yourself online as a completely different person, so you can anonymously register on websites and hide your information from digital viewers.
You can choose a new name, date of birth, email address, mailing address, and phone number to use when signing up for newsletters, stores, or anything else that might be an attractive target for data thieves. This is perfect if, like me, you have thousands of marketing emails blocking your inbox.
Clean Web
CleanWeb is Surfshark’s ad blocker, which offers the added ability to prevent cookie consent pop-ups from appearing and slowing down your browsing.
For those who want an even more private browsing experience, Surfshark One and Surfshark One Plus also offer a web browser that does not store any browsing data.
What are the other options?
Surfshark is our pick for the best cheap VPN, and its unlimited device coverage is hard to ignore, but it’s not without its competitors, some of which go further in key areas.
Proton VPN’s Stealth protocol, for example, makes it easy to hide the fact that you’re even using a VPN, which could be useful in countries with stricter VPN regulations or censorship laws.
For a little more money, NordVPN is our pick for the best overall VPN, offering particularly excellent streaming performance. And for those on a tighter budget and just need a basic VPN, PrivadoVPN’s limited free service might suffice – even if it doesn’t have Surfshark’s range of security features.
