Photo Copiers an Identity Theft Risk?
I think everyone has used those big copy machines you find at businesses and schools, you know the ones that can print copies out at a high speed and staple and sort documents for you. These machines have the capability to scan, fax, and even email document scanned into them. One of the ways they are able to do this is by storing the documents in various sizes to a hard drive in the machine. This makes for a great copier, but when it’s time to get rid of the old machine and get a new one who is in charge of removing these old printing jobs from the machine. Some machines can store up to 25,000 print jobs on their hard drive any of which can be pulled up and printed.
A company that is concerned about document security might remove the hard drive and destroy them for compete security. This of course would render the printer useless and would ruin it’s resale value, so must companies wouldn’t do this. Companies should at least delete the print jobs from the hard drive before selling or throwing away that machine, but you would be surprised how often this does not happen.
An Oakland, California news station investigated a copier warehouse full of copiers up for sale. They found that many copiers still have print jobs stored on them some of which were still filled with personal information including but not limited to people’s medical records, Social Security Numbers, addresses, and phone numbers.
Think about all the places that copy important documents for filing purposes. What happens to the copy machine when it’s time to get rid of it. It will probably go to a copier warehouse where it will be repaired and put up for resale. A warehouse full of copy machine, which are full of documents stored on their hard drives. Sounds like an identity theft heaven to me! It’s like getting complete access to a companies files with a handy printer to print then at high speed.
I don’t know that there is anything someone can do to prevent this kind of data breach other than just watch their credit and bank accounts for anything suspicious. If you work for a company you could bring up that the copier’s hard drives need to be wiped before getting rip of it. One could sign up for an identity theft protection service like LifeLock, which would be the ideal situation, and would provide optimal protection.
Tags: copier machine, copy machine, ID theft, identity theft, identity theft protection