Banks are pushing sales of identity-theft services, but customers should tread lightly: Not only can they get the same level of protection for free on their own, but complaints against such services are mounting and regulators are questioning their effectiveness.

Bank of America (bac) Corp., Citigroup (C) Inc.'s Citibank, J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM) & Co., Fifth Third Bancorp (FITB) and Wells Fargo (WFC) & Co. are ramping up their marketing of protection packages through pop-up and banner ads on online-banking websites, customer-service pitches in branches, on the phone or in the mail. Pricing is similar to standard identity-theft protection services offered by companies such as LifeLock Inc. and Equifax (EFX) Inc.'s ID Patrol. Some banks, including Citibank and Fifth Third, offer a promotional rate of $1 for the first month, then charge higher rates after that $12.95 and up to $9.95 a month, respectively.

The services provide daily credit monitoring to detect changes to credit scores or to flag new accounts, like a credit card or car loan, opened in a consumer's name. Much like traditional identity-theft services, they promise to send immediate alerts about such activity and give consumers access to credit reports from the three major agencies.

Filling Revenue Gaps

The push is the latest attempt by banks to fill revenue gaps left by the recent regulatory limits on their traditional sources of income, including credit and debit cards and overdraft and interchange fees, says Jack Kaplan, managing director of Carret Asset Management LLC.

Most of the banks pitch these services which are largely unregulated to their existing customers by touting the benefits of protecting their savings and good credit standing.

For consumers who entrust their daily financial lives to their bank already, a pitch to protect their identity can be powerful. At Fifth Third, which has 2.5 million checking-account customers, nearly a third of its new checking-account customers enroll in the bank's Identity Alert service for up to $9.95 a month within the first 90 days of becoming a customer, says a bank spokesman.

Yet most of the services merely offer credit monitoring, which tracks credit reports for changes indicative of fraud, such as a new inquiry for a credit card or an address change, and then alerts a customer by phone, email or text.

Some services, like those offered by Bank of America and Fifth Third's partner programs, go a step further, monitoring online chat rooms where data thieves sell information, but that sort of theft represents only about 3% of stolen identities, says Jay Foley, executive director of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit group.

What's more, the banks don't provide the service directly. Instead, they partner with other firms that handle most of the legwork. Several of these firms have track records littered with consumer complaints, lawsuits from state attorneys general or poor grades from the Better Business Bureau.

For example, First Advantage, which partners with Chase Bank, has one of the lowest BBB grades for its protection services a C-minus partly due to allegations by customers of undetected identity theft, long waits for copies of promised credit reports and a lack of responsiveness to queries for help. First Advantage and Chase declined to comment on their program.

Coming Under Fire

Credit-card issuers who pitch similar products also have come under fire. In November, for example, Minnesota's attorney general filed suit against Discover Financial Services in state court for allegedly deceptive marketing pitches after customers complained they were signed up and charged for identity-theft protection and credit-score tracking without their authorization; the case is still in progress. A Discover spokeswoman declined to comment on the status of pending litigation.

Citibank, Fifth Third, Wells Fargo and BofA say their products help protect customers from identity theft by detecting problems earlier and that being enrolled in its services means faster recovery of a stolen identity. But consumer advocates and identity-theft experts say such services can't protect from data breaches, criminal fraud, medical identity theft or fraudulent Social Security number use among the most common forms of identity theft.

"There's no such thing as immunity to identity theft," says David Lincicum, a staff attorney for the Federal Trade Commission's division of privacy and identity protection.

Consumers can take steps on their own for little or no cost to protect themselves from or at least quickly detect attempts to steal their identity. Federal law permits consumers to access credit reports for free once a year from the national credit bureaus, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, and some states mandate more frequent access.

Worried consumers also can place fraud alerts on their credit reports on their own, for free, by contacting each of the three credit bureaus. Once in place, lenders must attempt to verify an applicant's identity before issuing credit in their name. For a charge of $3 to $10, consumers can go a step further and place a security freeze on their credit reports to prevent lenders from issuing new loans in their name. The fee is often waived for identity-theft victims.

If you do find out that fraudulent accounts have been opened in your name, file a police report that details those accounts and the lenders they are with. Sending a letter with a copy of that report to the lenders will usually get the fraudulent accounts removed from your credit report within 90 days, without the help of an attorney, says Mr. Foley of the Identity Theft Resource Center.