Products prevent identity fraud

A new crop of products is on the market to prevent identity theft. It includes products to scour the Internet looking for signs that criminals have found your information so you can put up a firewall to block them.

Other products focus on keeping your information locked down at your bank or as you shop online with your credit card. There is definitely a need. Just look at the numbers: 9.9 million Americans were victims of identity theft in 2008, up from 8.1 million in 2007.

Here are some of the new products:

• LifeLock monitors change of address filings and applications for credit cards so it can alert its customers.
• TrustedID provides a service that analyzes both public and proprietary data to assess a person's risk of identity theft.
• LifeLock and CardCops scour the Internet and hacker chat rooms, warming customers if their data is spotted.
• StolenIDsearch.com has a database with 138 million records. It searches for personnel information and lets you know if someone has yours.

For more on products to fight ID theft:
- see this New York Times article

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