If you ever walk into any store that sells appliances or electronic goods in the U.S., it is very likely that you will find a wide variety of personal document shredders available for sale there. I believe this is a relatively new phenomenon, as I do not recall seeing these when I was growing up.
As I understand it, the justification for these devices is that people are concerned that some criminal might dig through their garbage as it sits out by the curb on Wednesday morning, hoping to find an unshredded bank statement, financial statement, credit card offer, or whatever, and then proceed to steal there I.D., buy a bunch of stuff, and ruin their credit history.
It seems hard to believe that some high-tech, white-collar criminal would be willing to dumpster dive, picking through the various soiled diapers and bloody tampons in hopes of finding a piece of paper with an account number, while not even knowing if they have good credit to begin with. Is there any documentation that anything like this ever happened? What is the justification for this intense fear??
Oh, God, yes. I saw a woman interviewed on the news who had just gotten out of jail for being convicted of doing just that, and part of her public-service is making speeches warning people not to throw away anything with usable personal information on it into a Dumpser or trash can.
Oddly, one of the college professors who had her lecture his class had been one of her victims!
I think you’re mischaracterizing identity thieves when you call them “high tech white collar.” Surely some of them are, but there are varying degrees of identity theft. People call phone companies, for example, to set up service in someone else’s name. They don’t need much in the way of personal information to do that. A social security number might be enough.
Dumpster diving - you’d be amazed what you can find in some company’s dumpters - printed emails confirming password changes, scraps to paper with password lists, that sort of thing.
Social engineering - where a hacker calls a company’s IT department pretending to be “Bob” from accounting whose forgotten his password. The gullible IT guy then gives out the password. Once this has happened, it’s trivial in most cases to figure out Bob’s username. There are a million variations that can also be used with this type of scam - for example, you can call a secretary pretending to be an IT guy yourself and ask for passwords.
Bad practices - Using extremely simple (or no) passwords on public systems, leaving computers in their simplest possible secuirty configurations, etc. The “CD Universe” hack job - where some Russians stole hundreds of thousands of names, addresses and credit card numbers - was apparently accomplished due to CD Universe having a “blank” password on one of their systems.
Given that dumpster diving is so prevalent in the hacking and corporate espionage worlds, I can’t imagine that it’s uncommon in the ID theft worlds as well. But yet, I can’t find a documented case of it either.
They don’t need that much – if the thief has your name, address, and social security number, they’ve got 90% of the stuff they need to get a credit card with your name (and oftentimes your address is optional). Toss in a fake ID, and they’re good to go.
Don’t forget that a number of banks are now sending out pre-approved credit card applications, too. So the thief doesn’t have to check if you have good credit or not, the bank’s already done the work for them. And really, is sifting through someone’s discarded rubbish for a few hours too much work if it means you end up on a $30,000 shopping spree sponsored by Joe Victim?
“1.5 percent of survey participants reported that in the last year they had discovered that their personal information had been misused to open new credit accounts, take out new loans, or engage in other types of fraud, such as misuse of the victim’s name and identifying information when someone is charged with a crime, when renting an apartment, or when obtaining medical care (”‘New Accounts & Other Frauds’ ID Theft"). This result suggests that almost 3.25 million Americans discovered that their personal information had been misused in this kind of fraud in the past year." (Federal Trade Commission Report, 9/2003)
Now, granted, it doesn’t say how many of these incidents occurred from folks digging through garbage bins. But considering what little information a thief needs to pull off this crime, and how much this information is available in our garbage, it’s not hard to believe that dumpster diving does pay off.
I do think that most of the paranoia about people digging through garbage to get your information is hyped. Getting your account number isn’t too difficult. Just think about giving your CC to a waiter at a restaurant. Call in to activate a cell phone and all your personal information is going to a $9.00 per hour temp ( or cheaper if they’re in India) A hotel clerk will have your address and CC #. A rental car clerk gets your CC and driver license info.
Happened to me. Not fiull scale identity theft, but many many years back i had disposed of some checks on an account that had been closed for like 3 years. SOmeone found a few of these and started writing bad checks. TO get past the checking for ID, these people would write a fake Visa or DL number on the top before handing it over.
Luckily the last bad one was passed about 5 years ago so it seems to be long dead.
In addition since it was an obvious forgery (and some of these happened on a closed account in a state I wasn’t living in at the time), I didn;t have to pay for them. But it did give me bad credit marks for a while until it was cleared up.
Yes, it goes on. Here in the UK a guy named Benjamin Pell became famous doing it. He was featured in a couple of high profile legal cases, and they made a TV documentary about him. He wasn’t sorting through garbage for personal ID information, although he found plenty, but instead went through the junk tossed out by big companies and media celebs looking for anything that would make a good scandal or story he could sell to the newspapers. He used to collect literally tons of garbage, drag it back to his garden and then sort through it methodically. Probably not the most fragrant garden in the country.
So, to expand on Surreal’s point, is there any evidence that dumpster diving is a significant problem? It appears from the conversation here that it is exceedingly rare, and that we (and apparently the US Government) are spending a lot of energy keeping a non-crisis at bay. Has anyone kicked out a dollar figure? Number of people affected by the crime?