#Privacy guard reviews trial#
Giving up your credit information also allows Affinion to automatically charge your card a monthly membership fee after the trial period, which is disclosed on the sign-up form. Customers can sign up online and must provide credit-card billing information to pay the small fee. Fifth Third Bank, which serves 15 states, most in the Midwest, and Affinion, a leading provider of ID-protection products to banks, market Identity Alert by offering 30 days of service for $1. Only 765,000 households were victims of this form of ID theft in 2010, according to the Bureau of Justice statistics, which means the chance of it happening to you is less than 1 percent a year. What's relatively rare is "new account" and "personal information" ID theft, in which someone uses your name, birth date, and Social Security number to open new credit accounts, tap your health insurance, earn taxable income, or commit crimes in your name. After two days, liability can climb to $500 or more, but many banks provide additional voluntary protections. For debit cards, liability for an unauthorized transaction is limited to $50 if it's reported within two business days of the date a cardholder learns of it. Department of Justice, but in most cases a cardholder's liability is limited to $50 for a lost or stolen credit card. More than 80 percent of what's been called identity theft involves fraudulent charges on existing accounts, according to the U.S. Even the statistic of 8 million victims overstates the danger. Take the threat seriously, but don't panic. And consumers have become more eagle-eyed about their own accounts, without the need for a paid subscription service. More significant, identity fraud is down because financial institutions are doing a better job preventing it. As of last fall, Experian Protect MyID was also still claiming that ID theft is "one of the fastest-growing crimes." The latest available data show that in 2010 identity fraud fell 27 percent, to 8.1 million victims. That promo, which ran in November 2011, was based on statistics that were out of date. "And with a growing 11 million victims each year, one of those identities could be yours." "There were 1.2 million more victims in 2009 than 2008," Chase warned on its website. Some ID protectors scare up business with inflated claims about crime. We dug into the latest products sold by more than two dozen banks, credit-reporting bureaus, and independent companies. And some promoters of these services have been slapped by the Federal Trade Commission for misleading sales practices and false claims. In the past we've found that these protection plans provide questionable value. In a sense, consumers who buy this protection from their banks are helping to foot the bill for services that financial institutions are obligated to provide by federal law to shield their customers from losses stemming from credit-card and bank-account fraud. More of these pitches are coming from banks, which account for more than half of the $3.5 billion a year spent on ID-theft protection subscriptions. Some throw in up to $1 million in insurance. Those services, which cost about $120 to $300 a year, promise to protect your ID by monitoring your credit reports 24/7, scouring "black-market chat rooms" for your personal information, removing your name from marketing lists, and filing fraud alerts. Almost 50 million people subscribed to some form of identity-theft protection in 2010.
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