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Mobile shredders help battle ID theft
BBB holds its third free-shredding day
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Published: October 18, 2009
Althea Taylor Jones of Kernersville pulled alongside a mobile shredder truck yesterday in the parking lot of Joel Coliseum.
Her Honda SUV was crammed with boxes of documents.
"I cleaned out stuff in my home office," said Jones, who was there with her husband, the Rev. Joseph Jones of Zion Memorial Baptist Church in Winston-Salem.
Jones popped open the hatch of her SUV, and employees from Cintas Document Management put her papers in a garbage container, then dumped them into a shredder bin inside the truck.
James McBryde, a service representative for Cintas, watched the documents being destroyed on a small TV screen attached to the side of the truck.
"Once we get back to the warehouse, we empty this truck out and get all this baled up, and then we load it on tractor-trailers and send it off to have it recycled," McBryde said.
The Better Business Bureau of Northwest North Carolina invited small businesses and individuals to bring their sensitive documents, CDS and floppy discs to the coliseum yesterday as part of the national Better Business Bureau's Secure Your ID Day.
Participants received free document shredding and tips on protecting their identities -- and they didn't even have to get out of their vehicles.
"It's really to call attention to the importance of properly managing your personal information," said David Dalrymple, the president of the BBB of Northwest North Carolina. "ID theft, I don't expect it's going to go away."
This was the third Secure Your ID Day held by the local Better Business Bureau. Organizers counted 450 vehicles, and shredded 17,500 pounds of documents at their fall 2008 event, and had 210 vehicles and 15,220 pounds of shredded paper at their spring 2009 event.
The number of documents shredded yesterday was unavailable, but Dalrymple said that about 122 vehicles came through.
According to the 2008 Javelin Strategy & Research Report, the majority of identify theft occurs when thieves get access to personal identification through such items as stolen and lost wallets, checkbooks, credit cards and stolen mail from unlocked mailboxes.
Jones knows how important it is to protect one's identity from scam artists.
She recently retired as professor in the gerontology program at Winston-Salem State University. She has worked for years with the elderly and continues to do so at Zion Memorial, teaching them about fraud and the importance of shredding their personal documents.
Linda Messick of Clemmons said that her home shredder broke several months ago, so she was happy to hear about the free shredding. She brought such documents as old bank statements, information from a retirement account that listed her Social Security number, and unsolicited credit-card applications bearing her name and address.
"You can't just cut it up anymore and throw it in the trash because somebody could get it out," Messick said.
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