National City Corp. of Cleveland is offering its customers identity theft monitoring and insurance products and services but said its offering is not a response to any recent security breach.
The products and services are a more extensive version of what some other banking companies are offering in response to a security breach that was disclosed last week, National City said Monday.
Wachovia Corp. and Bank of America Corp. said Monday that they would offer free credit reports and monitoring services to more than 100,000 customers whose account details and personal information had been stolen. The theft, which police in Hackensack, N.J., disclosed last week, also affected customers of PNC Financial Services Group Inc. and Commerce Bancorp Inc. of Cherry Hill.
Thomas Munoz, the product manager for National City Insurance Group, said its offerings were not prompted by any specific incident, though numerous banking companies and retailers have reported this year that their customer databases have been compromised.
Nat City is offering a combination of products and services from three other companies. The package includes weekly and quarterly e-mails from Trans-Union LLC of Chicago, with a link to a secure Web site with information from their credit reports; up to $25,000 of insurance from Travelers Insurance Co. to cover the costs of reclaiming a stolen identity; and access to counselors from Kroll Inc., a New York company that helps identity theft victims.
“Identity theft is a growing problem, so we looked for providers in the marketplace that had the ability to help fight identity theft,” Mr. Munoz said. “Customers have not been requesting this; we felt it was necessary.”
Nat City charges a monthly fee for the package, he said.
Other banking companies have similar offerings, including PNC and Washington Mutual Inc. Nonbanks such as Intersections Inc. also offer such products and services, directly or through banking and thrift companies such as Wamu. The three major credit bureaus — Experian Inc., Equifax Inc., and TransUnion — also offer regular access to credit reports.
Christy Phillips, a Wachovia spokeswoman, said it is offering a one-year subscription to Identity Guard, an Intersections service that monitors, insures, and gives customers unlimited access to their credit reports, to its 48,000 current and former customers who were affected by the breach. It is also monitoring activity on current customer accounts but has not seen any signs of fraud so far.
Wachovia does not sell the service directly or offer it free to customers who were not affected by a security lapse, but the security section of Wachovia.com has a link to Intersections’ Web site.
Alex Liftman, a B of A spokeswoman, said that each of the approximately 60,000 customers affected is being offered a credit report from TransUnion. B of A is also letting them add a 90-day fraud alert to the report.
Brian Goerke, a PNC spokesman, said that only 12 of its customer accounts may have been compromised, and that PNC sent those customers three free credit reports and educational materials on how to spot and address identity theft.
Avivah Litan, a vice president and research director at the Stamford, Conn., market research company Gartner Inc., said services such as those offered by Nat City and Intersections are “the best type of protection you can get today, but it’s limited.” With these services, “the customer’s definitely better off; they just should not develop a false sense of security.”
Even when a customer requests a credit report, “it will only tell you what’s happening with a direct match of your data against the credit bureau’s,” she said. If someone is using a stolen Social Security number with a mismatched name, the partial match is not disclosed, because the bureaus and the government cannot always determine who is the real owner of the information.
“It won’t tell you if someone stole your Social Security number and is using it with another name,” she said. “It won’t tell you if someone stole your address and is using it with another name. It won’t tell you if someone stole your information and took out a driver’s license so they can pretend they’re you when they’re caught running drugs.”
