Brownsville police urge residents to take care of what is thrown away

By JOSÉ BORJÓN
The Brownsville Herald

December 24, 2006 — If you’re not careful what you throw in your trash, you might be throwing away your most valuable possession: your identity.

In the last two months, police report at least seven complaints from local residents whose trashcans or trash was stolen.

“This is what we commonly refer to as Dumpster diving,” police Sgt. William Dietrich said.

This sort of trash picking can be profitable.

“The suspect will obtain vital financial information by simply digging through trash,” Dietrich said. “It’s become a problem recently in the past three to four years.”

This year alone, there have been about 1,000 cases of identity theft reported to the Brownsville Police Department, Sgt. Jimmy Manrrique said.

In 2001, there were more than 100,000 cases of identity theft in the United States, and that has increased to more than 1 million cases per year, Dietrich said.

“Over a five-year period, more than 27 million consumers were victims of identity theft,” according to a Federal Trade Commission Survey conducted in 2003. Read more.

OSA Editorial Comments:

Especially the day after Christmas, you need to aware of what this this article teaches! It has a lot of good informaition about why you want to destroy all your personal information by putting it into a crosscut shredder, also a good start is, go and

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