Pros Of Using A Shredding Service, Part 1

Check stubs, bank statements, account numbers, and actually any documents with personal information such as social security numbers on them.  What do these have in common? Every one of them could be used by identity thieves and should be disposed of by shredding.

Identity theft is unfortunately a growing concern and, if personal information is not destroyed properly, it’s fairly easy. Think it won’t happen to you? According to Identitytheft.info approximately 15 million US residents are victims of identity theft on some level each year. That breaks down to about 7% of American adults who have had to deal with the detrimental and long-lasting effects of having personal information leak out.

The amount of information obtained and damage done by someone only having your name, address, date of birth, and phone number is astonishing.  Add your social security number, bank account number and your mother’s maiden name to the mix and you have a veritable recipe for disaster.

Those who wish to use it for detrimental purposes usually obtain your personal information by one of two ways; an account database is hacked into electronically or your trash has been gone through.

But you shred all of your documents with personal information on them, right? Well imagine being paid to put together a 100-piece jigsaw puzzle. The pieces of the puzzle, however, have been put into a small trash bag along with pieces of other puzzles. Would you eventually be able to find the 100 pieces you needed?  If you had to go through all of that to put it together, would you?

A cost-to-benefit ratio would then come into play where the benefit, or in this case payment, would have to outweigh the cost, or time and energy, to find the right pieces and put it together.

The puzzle piece scenario may sound silly but shredded documents are essentially like puzzles. Once you have every piece of the document in the right order, you are able to see the picture, or information, on it. If the information on the documents were worth enough money, it would be more than worth the time and energy.

Now picture the same amount of puzzle pieces in a dump truck or box truck along with utterly millions of other puzzle pieces of essentially the same color. This task becomes monumental and throws the cost-to-benefit ratio way out of whack.

A shredding service will give you that amount of security. Once your documents are shredded and mixed with thousands of other shredded documents, the chances of identity thieves finding their "needle in a haystack" are diminished to almost none.  For more information on the security that Integra Document Destruction can bring you visit www.wasteawaygroup.com