Document Destruction Services, Inc. partners with American Security Shredding, Inc.

Document Destruction Services, Inc. has formally partnered with American Security Shredding, Inc. of Asheville, North Carolina. The new partnership allows both companies to efficiently service customers throughout Western North Carolina and North Georgia.

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Document Destruction Services, Inc. is now AAA NAID Certified

Document Destruction Services has succesfully completed the required third party audit to become NAID AAA Certified. The AAA Certification is a program developed by the National Association of Information Destruction NAID offers a voluntary annual operations certification program to its member companies. Through the program, NAID Active Members may seek annual certification audits for both Mobile and Plant-based operations. Only security professionals with the Certified Protection Professional (CPP) accreditation conduct the audits. The CPP accreditation is issued by the American Society for Industrial Security.The NAID Certification Program establishes minimum standards for employee hiring and screening, operations, the destruction process, and insurance as well as other security factors.

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Europe’s Data Privacy Directives Effect U. S.

The European Union’s data privacy directives went into effect as of October 25th. And while only a few countries have passed the laws to enforce it, the consensus is that it will be widely adopted by each member of the EU over the next few months.

At the heart of the issue is the US insistence that an industry-led approach is preferable to government regulation. It is clear, however, that boardrooms around the world will very soon have to face the matter of privacy protection and acknowledge the protection ensured by other governments to their citizens.

This has been underlined by two announcements. First, AT&T has unveiled plans to implement its own data privacy safeguards this month. NCR has also recently announced that it will implement safeguards to protect credit and other personal information supplied by EU participants to its Teradata Information Warehouse.

Many individual countries in the EU, such as Germany and England, already have strong data privacy protection laws, including restriction on discarding such information without destroying it. It remans to be seen whether pressure from EU trading partners will result in such laws in the U.S.

Many states are already considering this type of legislation because of the explosion in identity theft and credit card fraud in the last couple of years.

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Medical Trash Used for Fraud
Haunts Patients/Raises IRS Flag

(AP) The New York Times reports that private insurance carriers have paid over $1 billion in phony medical bills to bogus medical firms in the last few years.

Investigators said that companies, using post office boxes as return addresses, list the name of un-suspecting doctors and patients on submitted claim forms. After a few weeks, the companies shut down and move to open again under a different name. The bills include fabricated diagnoses of patients which are logged into insurance companies’ computers with the patient none the wiser.

This is very detrimental to the consumer because it affects their future insurability and employ-ability.

From the doctors side, the IRS becomes a problem because there is a major discrepancy in their income.

Investigators claim that perpetrators of this fraud scour the dumpsters of hospitals and medical facilities for the information.

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Rebate Fraud Clips Away at Manufacturers Controls
Dumpster Diving Valuable Tool in Coupon Scams

Cincinnati Enquire - Groups of mothers met weekly in Iowa Catholic churches to stuff envelops with fraudulent manufacturers’ rebate requests to raise money for the their schools.

A Massapequa, NY, woman and her daughters netted more than $200,000.00 by illegally redeeming rebate certificates.

Thousands of men and women across the country participate in rebating clubs via the Internet. They not only trade actual redemption coupons, but conspire to develop scams that will defraud manufacturers using promotional offers.

Investigators say that up to 90% of the rebate requests for a certain offer may be fraudulent.

According to Postal Inspector, Rick Bowdren, one of the more aggressive ways used to obtain labels and even rebate coupons themselves, is "dumpster diving". The perpetrators stake out dumpsters behind stores, manufacturing facilities and printing facilities were coupons are often casually discarded.

U.S. law enforcement officials estimate that between $600 million and $800 million are defrauded from manufacturers per year as a result of illicit rebate requests.

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Janitor was Already Moonlighting

Maintenance workers and other service personnel might not be well paid or especially well treated. They may have no particular loyalty to the employer. They are also easily impersonated and can sometimes be bought off. There’s a story of a competitive intelligence operative who approached a custodian working at a competitor’s facility and offered to pay him for separating the trash from a specific area and handing it over to him. The janitor refused. He had already been hired to do the same job for another competitor.

Quote by Marc Tanzer President, BCMnformation Security, Portland, OR in Security Management Magazine.

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Dumpster Diving in High Profile Court Battle
Seedy Case May Get Attention of Legal Field

The question is . . . did one of San Diego’s most prominent law firms hire a private detective to steal the trash from an opposing attorney? What isn’t in question is whether someone did. A recent ruling says that the private investigator caught with the law firm’s trash in her possession must tell who hired her.

It is all that much more intriguing because the case surrounds sexual harassment charges leveled against New Age guru, Depak Chopra.

In 1995, the venerable, megafirm Gray, Cary, Ware and Freidenrich was hired to bring a charge of sexual harassment against Dr. Chopra by an unnamed plaintiff. Dr. Chopra retained a low-profile, boutique law firm, Flynn, Sheridan, Tabb & Stillman, to defend himself. Shortly after that, partner Michael Flynn confronted a man taking bags of trash from the firm’s dumpster. The man, it turned out worked for a Private Investigator, Jona Boling. The latest ruling that the investigator must fess up is bringing this case back into the lime light.

In the wake of these events, have been suits and counter suits, allegations and denials. But regardless of how the events play out, a couple of things are apparent.

First, no matter if it was or wasn’t the law firm that hired the investigator to steal the trash, someone did.

Secondly, the case should get the attention of those firms that think they are at low risk for such tactics.

Attorney’s that think they only need to protect their stored records are going to wake up to the fact that the daily flow of incidental records from their offices, those documents and notes that are not part of any stored record, must be protected.

By the way, the firm who was victimized by the private detective claims that they have gone to great lengths to protect their trash. Those lengths include keeping the trash in an enclosed area in the parking lot. Evidentially, those measures were ineffective.

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Discarded Bank Trash Provides Path to Cash

Authorities say Ronald Jones and Yvonne Olivier, both of Jersey City, were able to swindle as much as $12,000 a week from New Jersey banks and their customers in seven counties over two years.

From early 1995 until late 1996, police charge that Jones, 58, took blank checks, bank account statements and transaction slips from Dumpsters at branches of Valley National Bank, Sovereign Bank, Fleet Bank, Chase Manhattan Bank, First Union Bank, Lakeland State Bank, Oritani Savings and Summit Bank.

Jones and Olivier were arrested in a Bergen County motel room in November 1996. They were under surveillance after East Hanover and Clark detectives noticed similarities in check fraud cases statewide in October 1996 and identified Olivier through bank videos.

At the time of his arrest, Jones was carrying credit card documents from bank customers, according to police. Jones, who is under indictment in Essex and Morris counties, made bail and fled. He has convictions dating back to 1965 for car theft and stamp theft, according to authorities.

His accomplice, Yvonne Olivier, 31, of Jersey City has pleaded guilty to theft and forgery charges in Morris and Monmouth counties.

At her sentencing yesterday in Morris County, Assistant Prosecutor George Davey laid out her part in what he described as "a fairly sophisticated scheme." After Jones retrieved checks and other bank documents from dumpsters behind the financial institutions, he would return to a hotel room and review his booty, Davey said. Jones, the father of Olivier’s nephew, then would drive her to a different branch of the bank, where she would cash the stolen checks, the prosecutor said.

"She actually went into the banks and pretended to be a legitimate customer," he said.

Police contend Jones kept most of the money and that Olivier benefited nominally from the scheme.

Superior Court Judge Theodore Bozonelis sentenced Olivier to the 434 days she already has served in the Morris County jail and ordered her to pay $4,485 in restitution. Bozonelis said the 14 months Olivier already has served was roughly the equivalent of a five-year state prison sentence when factoring in parole eligibility.

"It’s clear this period of incarceration was necessary to deter criminal activity," the judge said about Olivier, who had no prior criminal record. "This is a wide-ranging scheme that has approached statewide ramifications."

Her attorney, David Kervick, said Olivier still has similar charges pending in Essex, Union and Bergen counties. After her sentencing yesterday, Olivier was returned to Monmouth County, where she faces a four-year prison term.

Though most banks say they take precautions to prevent thefts from their trash, advocates for privacy rights say "You wouldn’t believe the stuff that isn’t shredded. It’s the height of irresponsibility," said Beth Givens of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego, Calif.

Only seven states have laws protecting personal customer information that is held by a bank, mortgage company, school, medical office or retail business, New Jersey isn’t one.

The laws prevent companies from disclosing confidential data on their customers, which would include care-lessly tossing unshredded documents that reveal account numbers and Social Security numbers, said David Szwak, a Louisiana lawyer who has sued banks on privacy claims.

Still, in New Jersey, customers have legal recourse, Szwak said.

"You usually end up having to sue them (banks) if you are able to find that the culprit stole the information from trash," he said.

Reckless disposal of customer information by businesses is illegal under confidentiality laws adopted in Alaska, Alabama, Connecticut, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine and Maryland. Oklahoma and Oregon also have laws imposing some limitations.

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Snubbed Movie Mogul Resorts to Dumpster Diving

As reported in a recent issue of New York Magazine, film producer Arnold Kopelson was snubbed when a new screenplay by New Zealander Andrew Niccol was recently distributed around Hollywood. That seemed to be little problem for the resourceful producer. Kopelson has reportedly been bragging all over town that he obtained a copy from the dumpster of CAA, the talent agency run by Michael Orvitz. The Orvitz’s firm is the agency which handles the screenwriter.

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Discarded To-Do List Leads to Fugitive’s Capture

As reported in The Ledger of Lakeland, Florida, two escaped prisoners with strong organizational skills were nabbed at the city’s main bus station. Evidently, the police used a highly detailed crime itinerary the felons discarded in a car which they had previously stolen.

"Buy Guns, Get Marie, Get Car, Do Robbery, Go to New York," read the "to-do" list that police discovered.

On the advice of this discarded note, police staked out the local bus station. The fugitives were apprehended there at about midnight.

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Heroic Discoveries by Trash Workers Raises Deeper Questions about Disposal

Norcal Waste recently sent their customers in the San Francisco area promotional materials in which they proudly announced the companies contribution to history. The piece chronicles how in the past several years the "eagle-eye" workers at the disposal facility, have plucked a number of notable historic papers that had been discarded.

When asked if workers look through all discarded papers, Robert Reed, a spokesman for the firm, said that the historic materials were found as a result of inspecting the trash for hazardous waste.

One can’t help but wonder though, how drawing such attention and kudos to the workers for finding these papers might not encourage them to be a bit more aggressive in their search for such items.

Moral of the story: Don t send them anything you don't want them to read.

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