Posted by Mike Smith :: January 6, 2009 @ 6:30 am

By now, everyone probably understands the identity theft risk of discarding sensitive personal information in the trash. Instead of simply tearing up any documents before discarding, ask yourself if that provides adequate protection.

That’s precisely the question explored by Rob, in his article The Torn-Up Credit Card Application. Following the advice both from a credit card issuer and the FTC website to shred or tear up unwanted credit card applications, he documents an interesting experiment that he ran. He tore up an application he received into small pieces and then taped the whole thing back together to simulate the efforts of a potential thief. He then filled out the application, including a change of address and cell phone number for verification, before sending it in.

As much as I hoped that the company offering the Chase MasterCard would discard any applications showing obvious signs of tampering, the card was issued and mailed to the address provided. Rob used his parents’ address so that the card wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands. He then used his cell phone to activate the card. The net effect is that he proved that a card would be sent to a new address and could be verified with a new phone number, even when the application had clearly been tampered with.

The conclusion is that simply ripping up a credit card application (or similarly sensitive document) is not sufficient. Investing in a shredder is probably worthwhile to protect your credit record and personally identifying information. Even shredded documents could be recovered and used, but shredding makes the task much more difficult. To make things even harder for thieves, you can split shredder output across multiple weeks of trash pickup. That way, only a portion of the shreds necessary to reconstruct your documents would be available to a thief at any one time.

It’s disconcerting that tearing up sensitive documents isn’t sufficient to thwart potential identity thieves. Learning about the results of Rob’s experiment will probably make you think twice before discarding anything other than the smallest shreds of personal information.

Do you use a shredder for all of your sensitive waste?