Identity Theft Protection -- I Hope

After doing a few hours of research a couple weeks ago I signed up for a service that hopefully protects me from someone trying to ruin my credit. Here's the noteworthy bi product of my findings.

• Citi Bank offers probably one the more heavily marketed services but ultimately only gives you the ability to do something after someone has already done harm to your credit report. They also offer the standard features of access to fraud specialists, insurance, and access to credit reports from the three major bureaus.
• IdentityGuard offers a similar service but gives you the added ability to do something if you suspect your information has been stolen. I'm not sure exactly what it is because I'm not a member but it seems like a more of a reactive approach if you even aware of the situation.
  
• TrustedID is the service I chose to use personally. They offer the same standard set of features the above sites do but allegedly prevent creditors from opening a new account without contacting you first to verify more information that you provided to TrustedID. They achieve this by sending out requests to the three major credit bureau every 90 days alerting them to put a security flag on my account. Now I don't know for sure if this works because I haven't opened a new credit account yet but I will be refinancing my mortgage in late December so we'll see what happens. This was the only service I could find that offered the ability to this automatically. Of course, if you wanted to, you could send the requests yourself every 90 days but for 7.95 a month, I'll just have someone I can put the blame on if things get nasty take care of it. In addition, if you state laws allow, you can freeze your credit so that absolutely no one can open a new account unless it is unfrozen by you first.

If anyone knows of any new or better services I would love to know so I could further my due diligence.

On a side note, I never realized how much of a booming industry this has become. It's by all means a sad state of affairs that the credit bureaus make hundreds of millions of dollars off our personal information and they can't even implement basic security for the consumer. I'm not usually pro government regulation but this problem is starting to flirt with my tolerance for such a thing.