Identity theft is a growing problem here in the United States, as well as in many other parts of the world too. Identity theft can have serious consequences and can greatly impact a victim’s quality of life. What with the surge of technology that has been inundating our world for the past few years, preventing identity theft has become harder than ever before as information – all too often information of a personal nature – becomes widely accessible to those who should not have it. In fact, identity theft has become so problematic and widespread that in the year of 2016 alone, around one adult in the United States out of every sixteen or so adults became a victim of it and had to learn how to rebuild their lives after such an event. This shows a jump of about fifteen percent from the identity theft cases that were seen in the previous year of 2015. It’s even considered to be the crime that is growing the fastest in the entirety of the United States.
We all know about avoiding identity theft on the internet, as there has been a considerably amount of fear surrounding just that. We know not to give personal information like bank account numbers and social security numbers to sites that have not been verified and authenticated. Security programs are even able to typically realize whether or not a site poses a threat, and can warn the user of the computer accordingly. Even just by word of mouth, it can easily be spread which sites are alright to use and which should be avoided at all costs.
But the cases of identity theft that occur from the stealing of print information have kind of fallen by the wayside, at least in the terms of how they are discussed and dealt with. This can be attributed to the fact that our world has becoming so technologically charged, so overwhelmingly digital, that it can be somewhat easy to forget that print sources even exist in the first place. We tend to think of print sources as somewhat outdated, when in reality this is far from the case. Hard copies of documents, especially those that contain highly personal or even classified information, are still prevalent throughout the world, both among private citizens as well as in places of business too. And identity theft is still all too common among such documents. In fact, the majority of identity theft originates from hard copies of documents, as much as an astonishing ninety percent of it in total (which, to be honest, is very nearly all of identity theft cases seen here in the United States).
So what can you do to prevent identity theft from happening to you, especially from happening as a result of the mishandling of a paper document? First of all, it is important to always manage your paper documents carefully, taking extra care to make sure that none are lost. Once you are ready to discard them, it is not enough to simply throw them away. You must also destroy any important and sensitive information that they contain. Hiring a mobile shredding company to schedule your document shredding can help to ensure this. A mobile shredding company that lets you schedule your shredding for whatever time works best for you can help you to avoid identity theft, as a mobile shredding company will be able to completely destroy all pertinent information on the documents that it is destroying. And the paper shredding services that a mobile shredding company offers are becoming more and more in demand as incidences of identity theft grow. Finding a local mobile shredding company near you can even mean the difference between avoiding identity theft and falling victim to it, something that happens to far too many people if they don’t take advantage of a mobile shredding company in their area, as the mobile shredding company is becoming more commonplace here in the United States.
Identity theft is scary, but shredding companies, you will more likely than not be able to avoid it entirely.
