A strong paper shredding program can help you protect yourself from being the victum of identity theft caused by your printed material falling in the hands of theives.  .

• Shred any document which could be used for the purpose of identity theft (social security numbers, customer lists, credit applications, tax returns, etc).
• Shred any document which could cause harm in the hands of criminals or competitors (canceled checks, credit card applications, credit card numbers)
• Shred any papers which could cause harm to you or others in the hands of criminals.

Always destroy any item which could cause harm. The following are some examples of items other than paper, which should be destroyed.

SHRED ELECTRONIC MEDIA

• Computer Hard Drives
• Compact Disks (CD's),
• DVDs
• more...

Learn more about shredding electronic media...

OTHER MISCELLANEOUS PRODUCTS

• Recalled products
• Uniforms (including private security guard, police, fire, public safety employees)
• ID Badges
• Spec products
• more...

Learn more about shredding miscellaneous products...

Many individuals and even some small businesses buy a small personal shredder and attempt to shred their confidential material themselves.  For some, this solution works fine.  However, after spending the money, many people realize that this may not be the best solution.  Here are a few of the complaints that cause people to stop using their personal shredders.

It's too time consuming feeding one piece of paper at a time through my shredder. I hate having to deal with endless paper jams! I don't want to have to maintain the equipment myself and dispose of the paper myself. My shredder is such a pain to deal with that I end up just throwing away stuff that I should probably shred. I've got kids that get into EVERYTHING and it makes me nervous having a paper shredder around the house.

DANGER: The personal home shredder can also be dangerous to small children and pets.

Personal shredders were at one point only found in office environments.  As incidents of identify theft have grown, concerned individuals began buying these paper shredders as a means of destroying their own confidential information.  Many of these paper shredders, having been built for adult operation in office environments, lacked safety standards like on/off buttons and had large enough slots for small body parts to touch the blades.  As a result, there have been a number of reports of small children injuring (and losing) fingers, and dogs getting ears or tongues caught in the blades. 

If you own a personal home shredder, take the necessary precautions to prevent these types of injuries, like keeping it out of reach of small children or pets, keeping it unplugged when not in use, never allow your children to operate the machine, and be careful to remove any and all hanging items or loose fitting clothes when operating it yourself.  Or, simply dump your personal home shredder and drop your confidential material off at a ShredDropOff location.

 VIDEO: If you hate your shredder, you'll love this video.

Material that has not been shredded can easily be stolen!

According to the Better Business Bureau, most identity thieves still obtain personal information through traditional means, rather than electronic means. Securing the services of a shredding company would go a great distance to stop this aspect of the  problem. Where the method of theft is known, almost 70% of information was obtained by dumpster diving and physically stealing the data, versus 12% obtained online. Virtually none of that data had been shredded by a shredding company.

One of the best self-defense measures consumers and small businesses can implement is to shred information before discarding it. Everyone can afford to take the information to a shred drop off location.

Securing the services of a professional document shredding company can be very inexpensive. ShredDropOff Location prices vary but the minimum charges are small compared to the cost of fixing the problems after the fact.

Find the ShredDropOff location in your area and make a habit of getting all your confidential information shredded by a professional shredding company.