Important infomation about Identity Theft Protection companies

Companies that sell "identity-theft protection" present an alluring but questionable proposition.

For as much as about $100 per year, the main thing they do is set fraud alerts that force banks to call people before new lines of credit are opened in their names. The alerts can be useful - but people can set them themselves, for free.

Now even that function could be taken away from the ID theft-prevention services.

A federal court in California has blocked Tempe, Ariz.-based LifeLock, one of the industry's biggest players, from setting fraud alerts with Experian, one of the three main credit-reporting agencies that manage the fraud alerts.

Experian is suing LifeLock, claiming that LifeLock's automatic renewal of customers' fraud alerts - which happens every 90 days, when they expire - costs Experian millions of dollars in processing expenses.

Click here to read the entire article