Identity Theft Articles

Running a business that involves keeping your clients’ most sensitive information on file is never a simple task. There are a variety of privacy concerns to consider, in addition to setting the clients’ minds at ease. When it comes to document destruction and shredding services, the best way to ensure simplicity and quality is to hire an outside firm to shred your sensitive papers on-site or off-site - and for many professionals, such as lawyers, physicians and accountants, the easiest and most efficient method happens to be the method required by federal law.

Legislation such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and the Gramm-Leach Bliley Financial Modernization Act dictate the terms under which doctors, lawyers and accountants must engage in document destruction, and what kinds of shredding services firms they may employ to do so. But even within the rules set by those laws, there is a wide range of easy ways to shred old documents.

Shredding Paper Off-Site

One easy way to get rid of old papers and documents is to have them carted away by a professional document destruction firm and shredded at a secure facility.

Generally this is the best plan for large volumes of paper - say, more than 100 boxes of documents. A shredding project of this magnitude is usually best performed off-site, and the best document shredding firms will use machines that shred about 5,000 pounds of paper every hour.

When hiring a document shredding firm, be sure to ask whether it’s necessary for you to prepare the documents for destruction - and if it is, keep looking. The most efficient way to eliminate old documents and expired paperwork is to simply hand them over to the professionals in charge of shredding. Spending hours removing every paper clip, rubber band and staple isn’t a good use of your company’s time, so make sure the shredding-and-bailing unit your document destruction firm uses is a powerful one.

Scheduled Pickup and Destruction

If your firm generates a substantial amount of paperwork every week, it might be a good idea to hire a document destruction company that makes regular pickups. Many of the best shredding services in Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey will provide disposal bins, complete with lock and key. Schedule a regular pickup time, and make sure to have one or two employees serve as a regular liaison to the document destruction firm’s representatives. Your clients’ privacy will be worth it.

Mobile Document Shredding

You can always tell whether a document shredding company is of the highest quality by the shredding devices it uses. A company that uses a mobile document shredding unit is the best available, since that company’s employees can bring their document destruction capabilities with them wherever they go. If you’re a small agricultural company that stores its paperwork in an old barn, a mobile document shredding unit can go there. If your old documents are in an ancient warehouse on the outskirts of town, a mobile document shredding unit can go there.

These devices are impressive: Huge, self-contained machines that generate their own electrical power and devour everything they’re fed, from paper clips to file folders to rubber bands. If you’ve got what looks like a massive amount of old paperwork, files and documents, mobile document shredding may be the best way to go.

New Jersey may suffer from jokes about everything from its many suburbs to its residents’ accents, but one thing it can’t be mocked for is its attention to identity theft. For more than a year now, New Jersey has had one of the strongest identity theft laws in the nation - one that expands the rights of consumers, as well as the responsibilities of businesses in data storage and financial record shredding.

After a thorough debate throughout much of 2005, the New Jersey state assembly passed that state’s Identity Theft Protection Act, which came into effect on the first day of 2006. Under the law, consumers may request security freezes on their credit reports, better protect personal information in their credit records, and file a police report when they suspect identity theft.

“The risk of identity theft continues to rise as weaknesses in data reporting and storage are exploited on a daily basis,” Assemblywoman Bonnie Watson Coleman, who introduced the law, told the Philadelphia Business Journal. Despite some political resistance, the bill passed with widespread support.

Document Destruction: The New Rules

The law also requires businesses collecting consumer information to engage in proper document destruction - which means more than simply deleting a consumer’s personal information from a hard drive. Often this means bringing on the expertise of a qualified document shredding firm to eliminate every form, receipt and duplicate copy containing sensitive information.

The new law has been a boon to document shredding services in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, who are commonly charged with financial and medical record shredding. In many cases, though, the new law also meant such document destruction companies also had to re-evaluate their privacy practices to make sure they were in line with the new law.

Fortunately, the new identity protection law’s specifics were similar to those outlined by other laws dictating consumer privacy, such as the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and the Gramm-Leach Bliley Financial Modernization Act (GLB).

Many of these laws require any businesses collecting private consumer information to enact a due-diligence search for high-quality document destruction services; it’s not always enough to simply have a shredder in the office. Document destruction services often use high-powered mega-shredders that run through paper, file folders, binder clips and rubber bands like a blue whale through a school of plankton.

A state or federally mandated due-diligence search often requires seeking references and asking specific questions about a document shredding firm’s methods and privacy considerations. The best shredding services will offer some kind of certification insuring that the documents have been destroyed, and this can range from a signed guarantee to a video recording of the process from start to finish.

Identity theft is one of the fastest growing consumer crime in the United States, with an estimated 7 million US citizens becoming victims in the last year. Quite expectedly, this is a great concern for the everyday consumer, who is now the primary target for this crime. Identity Theft is a crime that involves identity thieves attempting to steal the personal and private details of others, which are then used for personal gain.

A recent survey from US working-group on credit industry security revealed that an alarming 87% of Americans are unaware of the implications that identity theft can have on your life. You could end up owing hundreds of thousands of dollars from debts accrued from fraudulent applications you weren’t even aware of! It could take you years to repair the damage to your credit report and you could even be refused credit cards, loans, mortgages and even bank accounts due to the after effects of fraudulent identity crimes. Identity theft is a growing crime in the United States and can be categorized into four main types.

1. Financial Identity Theft - Financial Identity Theft involves the thief stealing other people’s details to generate a financial profit for themselves. This includes making fraudulent loan applications in another’s name, attempting to open new credit card accounts or even simply withdrawing funds from an account using stolen details.

2. Criminal Identity Theft - This is also quite a common type of identity theft which is often missed by the authorities when the thief is involved in minor crimes. This technique involves giving someone else’s identity when questioned, arrested or prosecuted for a crime by the police.

3. Identity Cloning - Identity cloning is when a thief steals an individuals complete identity. This method involves obtaining vital documents such as passports, driving licenses, social securities etc. This will eventually allow criminals to obtain passports, which can be sold.

4. Commercial Identity Theft - Commercial Identity Theft is a lesser-known type of this crime but is more often a crime of greater seriousness involving larger scale fraud. The thief will attempt to obtain finance using a false or stolen business identity. By nature, businesses are often allowed larger credit facilities.

The most common types of stolen details are of course, credit card and bank account numbers. These are the types we’re most aware of and quite simply, these allow the thief to access our financial accounts, which are then either emptied completely or charged with fraudulent purchases. There is nothing more horrifying than checking your bank balance to find it completely empty! However don’t panic just yet. As the financial industry become more aware of identity theft fraud attempts, they are constantly improving and upgrading security access for consumer accounts. Unfortunately as the industry is developing new ways to keep criminals out, fraudsters are finding ever more intuitive ways to get their hands on your sensitive data.