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 That promo, which ran in November 2011, was based on statistics that were out of date.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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