Shredding events. Maybe you’ve seen your bank, credit union or even your local municipality hosting one. They are growing more prevalent as individuals and organizations are becoming aware of the ever-increasing occurrence of identity theft and of how shredding is an effective measure to prevent it. So, what are shredding events? Are they safe? How do they work? Perhaps you are with an organization and have considered sponsoring a shred event but don’t know how to organize such an event.
You’ve got questions. We’ve got answers. Please read on.
Why shred your documents?
Incidents of identity theft are on the rise. In fact, according to the Federal Trade Commission’s national ranking of consumer complaints for 2014 released in 2015, identity theft crowned the top of the list, with more than 332,000 cases reported in 2014 alone. That number rose to more than 490,000 the following year.
As identity thieves can do their damage with as little information as a name and an address, not to mention social security and bank account numbers, one of the best ways to minimize the risk of identity theft is to destroy all records bearing such information rather than to simply toss it in the waste can. If just thrown out with yesterday’s garbage, that trashed information could become the proverbial other man’s treasure and bring someone’s undoing. Think bank accounts, HIPAA, credit ratings, client records, corporate espionage, etc. All it takes is a dumpster-diver, armed with the right data and know-how, and next thing you know, you not only have stolen identities, but possibly accounts drained and in some cases, heavy fines for HIPAA violations.
People often throw away such information just because its quick, cheap and convenient. Buying a shredder or scheduling a shredding service provider to come by your location requires time, energy and money. That’s why shred events are beautiful things for people who might otherwise toss their records. They offer a quick, cheap and convenient way to mitigate their chances of becoming victims — through shredding their sensitive documents.
What are shred events?
Shred events, called everything from shred fests, to shred-a-thons, to shred-it events are community shred events typically hosted by local organizations or businesses.
At such an event, typically a mobile shredding unit is positioned onsite in a parking lot where event patrons arrive with their documents and a shred unit attendant takes the material and sends it through the shredder — the patron witnessing the whole process.
If hosted by a business, often the shredding service will be free to the patron as the event is likely either a marketing effort by the business or a value-added service to customers but most definitely is an event raising awareness toward identity theft and it’s prevention. You will see banks, credit unions and other financial institutions and even city or county governments sponsoring these events.
If a non-profit or charity is sponsoring the event, the service may be free or patrons may be asked to give a donation in exchange for the service, the proceeds then going toward the organization’s cause.
In any case, the shred events offer their patrons a convenient, cheap and safe way to dispose of their private information and protect their identities. These events also are super green as they are an excellent way to preserve the environment by recycling paper and thence save trees and other natural resources.
Are shred events safe?
This question is good as you might be concerned about a stranger handling your private information. The answer is, it depends.
Here are some things to look for to see if the event is safe.
Can you witness the shredding process?
Are you able to watch your documents being shredded? Typically, shred events will have a mobile shred unit onsite with an attendant to help. Not only that, often the unit itself will have an onboard camera with a viewing screen allowing you and the attendant to view the paper as it is torn to oblivion. This is the safest arrangement.
Should you arrive to shred event to only see someone collecting documents and simply stashing them into a vehicle, ostensibly to haul to an offsite location for destruction, this you should regard more suspiciously as the person may in fact be taking the records to his own lair for perusal and use. Then again, it may be a legitimate shredding company, but offsite shredding by nature is not as secure as onsite.
Is the shredding company reputable and certified?
If you are unsure, search the name of the shred company online to see if it’s a reputable outfit and be sure to check the company’s certifications, for example, whether it is NAID-certified, or a if it’s member of a shredding organization like MSA. Such organizations require certain protocol to be followed and sometimes conduct surprise audits to ensure that member companies uphold the standards that keep you and your information safe.
How do shred events work?
As I mentioned before, shred events are typically organized by businesses or organizations, often as a freebie service for clientele or for fundraising — the service being rendered on a donation basis.
This is how these shred fests work:
1. The business/organization sponsors and schedules the event.
2. On day slated for the shredding event, the mobile shred unit arrives and sets up, sliding the bin chute out and producing locking, rolling shred bins ready to receive patron documents to be destroyed. Sometimes, if the event is held on a sunny, hot day, the shredding company may raise an awning to provide the attendant and patrons shade.
3. Customers arrive with documents which then the attendant helps to unload from vehicles and empty into shred bins.
4. Patrons watch as the attendant sends their documents up the chute, and look on and listen as the papers are shredded to bits.
Where and when to find a shred event
If you are looking for a shred event near you, go to your nearest computer or mobile device and search “shredding events near me,” and see what the “Google machine” will deliver. You can also click here to see if any are scheduled nearby. Otherwise here are some tips:
When: You’ll often find shredding events taking place on Saturday mornings and lasting a few hours. These events tend to be more common around and shortly after tax season as by then folks are trying to get rid of older or outdated tax records.
Where: As mentioned before, shred events tend to be hosted by financial institutions. Ask your bank, credit union, financial advisor or CPA. Who knows? They may themselves be sponsoring one. Otherwise, you’ll typically see these events in large public areas such as shopping center, school and church parking lots.
Hopefully, you’ve found these answers and tips and answers useful. If not, feel free to give us a call or send us an email.
Need to schedule a shredder for a shred event? Let us know!
Want to schedule a shred event for your organization? Call 405-605-8888.
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As this year’s tax filing season wraps up, you likely may by looking at your filing cabinet and thinking it might be time to reduce some of that paper weight and shred some expired tax forms.
Why not? You’ve already got the drawer open. It’s spring (meaning spring cleaning, yeah?) and Saturday is Earth Day (more on that in a bit). Why not do yourself a favor, do the Earth some good and get rid of those old tax documents?
What to Keep, What to Shred
So as you’re thumbing through W-2s, 1099s, 1040s and what not of long passed years, you might be wondering which forms to keep and which to shred? According to some tax professionals, most tax-payers should keep tax records at least three years (though many tax professionals recommend seven years) following the date you filed the return, or two years from the date you paid the tax, whichever comes last.
For other tax-related materials, things get a little more complicated. That’s why we’ve created this infographic as a quick, easy-to-read reference — but don’t take our word for it. Talk to your tax professional before destroying any records.
Don’t Trash Your Old Records, Shred and Recycle Them!
But what do you do with all those forms and supporting documents you’ve cleaned out of your filing cabinet? Don’t just toss it into the waste bin or dumpster. Shred it all.
With the prevalence these days of identity theft, you don’t want your trash to be another man’s treasure — literally. It’s really easy for nefarious miscreants to dig through trash bins, dumpsters and even landfills to mine names, social security numbers, financial accounts and other information personal to you.
Even if you are using a shredder, if you’ve ever seen the movie “Argo,” you would know shredded documents are easily reconstructed.
Ergo, we recommend either shredding with a cross-cut shredder, making your tax forms the most incredibly difficult (and boring) 1000-piece puzzle ever, or calling your local shredding company and having them do the job.
If that company is anything like us, they’ll send a mobile shredding truck to your location, destroy the documents in your sight and take the paper to a processing facility where it gets turned into pulp which is then formed into paper towels, toilet paper or other paper products. In other words, your documents will be rendered totally unusable, at least for identity theft purposes.
Here’s a fun fact: Did you know one ton of shredded and then recycled paper saves 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, 7,000 gallons of water, 3 cubic yards of landfill space and 4,000 kilowatts of energy?
So by going the shredding/recycling route, not only will you be protecting your identity, you’ll be saving the environment and the earth’s natural resources.
It’s like feeding two birds with one scone!
So celebrate Earth Day, another tax season gone by and a lighter filing cabinet by shredding your documents and then afterward going to your local coffee shop, eating a scone and throwing a few crumbs to the birds.
And don’t forget to wipe your mouth off with that napkin, possibly made of someone’s recycled tax return.
R.K. Black Shredding
If you are in need of a shredding solution, please call us and let us prove it to you.
To shred offsite or onsite, that is your question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer and know not whether your documents were indeed shredded, or to rest knowing they have been torn asunder.
Okay, enough Shakespeare. You want to know what is better, to have your confidential information destroyed by a mobile shredding service or offsite shredding service. While both types of vendors offer the protection businesses need from identity thieves, competitors and Malicious actors (no pun intended), both are not necessarily equal.
How are these different? Let us count the ways:
Onsite Shredding
Mobile document destruction or onsite document destruction is where the shredding company brings a shredding truck to your location, then collects and shreds your documents immediately before leaving your location.
Three features of onsite shredding service:
Immediate Destruction.With on-site destruction, you can be sure that within minutes of your bin being emptied, your documents are nothing but small, tattered fragments of paper.
Visible, Real-time Destruction.If you want, you can watch as your documents are carted out to the mobile shred unit, lifted into the chute, dumped into the hopper and diced to bits.
Single Step Handling. With mobile, on-site shredding, the documents are taken immediately from your shredding cabinet or bin and shredded, before the shredding truck ever leaves your location. The process is simple, reducing the chance for mistakes.
Offsite Shredding
In plant-based or off-site shredding, the shredding service vendor arrives at your location, picks up your documents, empties your shred cabinets into shred bins, retrieves your filled shred bins or collects banker boxes of documents to shred and hauls them to a location where the documents are then shredded.
Three features of offsite shredding service:
Imminent Destruction, maybe — but not immediate. With offsite or plant-based destruction, when you put a document in the bin to be destroyed, its destruction maybe imminent, but not immediate. From the point your documents are collected by your service, they may be held for hours or days before being put in the hopper.
Visible — but by DVR, so to speak. Plant-based operations, if they are NAID-certified — will have video surveillance of your documents being shredded on file, but you have to go through the hassle of requesting, retrieving and viewing it, long after the job has been done.
Many Steps, Many Handlers. With an off-site operation, the documents leave your location whole and legible, transported to the destruction site (if not a storage location beforehand) where they may sit, whole and legible, for however long until the company decides to shred the material.
Obviously, our bias is toward mobile shredding because that is what we do. And we do mobile shredding because we think it is the best and most secure document destruction solution.
Businesses of all industries create literally tons of paper. If your business is like most, you have lots of it stacked away in filing cabinets, even stashed in your desk drawers and maybe even piled on your desk … and now it’s time to rid your space of some of that paper weight.
Going through personal paperwork can be quite the chore (not knowing what you need to keep or trash and when) — not to mention the complexity of the same with business records. That’s why we’ve made a handy-dandy infographic to help you sort your documents to their fates — to the filing cabinet or to the shred bin and certain destruction.
As the infographic below is only a cheatsheet guide, please consult you CPA, financial advisor and/or attorney about your unique business before you do any shredding.
Infographic: Documents to keep, documents to destroy and when. Click to download PDF.
For those papers you decide to get rid of, make sure you don’t just throw them away as they may contain sensitive personal, personnel or company information — material you don’t want identity theives or competitors sorting through your trash to get ahold of. Contact a NAID-certified destruction company near you and have them shred your material. If they are anything like us, not only is your infomation shredded in front of your very eyes, the paper is then taken to a plant where it is then recycled and eventually turned into other paper products. See? Not only would you be protecting yourself and your company, but you’ll be helping to protect the environment too.
For those important documents you elect to keep, if they are important enough to store in your filing cabinet, they are likely important enough to digitize and store on a hard drive. Through some document management systems, you can easily store and retrieve your records and even create workflows, streamlining your whole process. But that’s a whole other topic. Click the button at the bottom of this page to learn more about our document management product.
Resources: IRS.gov, BBB.org
About R.K. Black, Inc.
R.K. Black, Inc. is an Oklahoma City-based, family-owned leading provider of office technology solutions to businesses in Oklahoma and Kansas. We specialize in everything business technology from copier, fax, printer and scanner technology to document management, onsite paper shredding services, VoIP phone systems and managed IT support to video surveillance solutions.
If you want to learn more about us, feel free to explore the website, read our other blogs or click the button below to be contacted by one of our reps and tell you! Also, be sure to keep watching our social media channels on Facebook and Twitter for more business tips from our blog.
R.K. Black has been in the paper shredding business for four years now. So just for kicks, a few weeks ago we decided to do some research based on our numbers and some some statistics from recycling-revolution.com on recycling paper just to see how much R.K. Black — with the help of our shredding clients’ businesses — has helped the environment.
We learned that as of a month ago, R.K. Black Shredding has recycled nearly 2,000 tons of paper from our client businesses.
Here’s an infographic to show what that means for the environment:
Infographic of 5 ways R.K. Black Shredding saves resources through recycling in Oklahoma City, OK
So, yes, those statistics are not too shabby, but our shredding is not the only way we are green. We’re also endevour to be good stewards of our beautiful planet in many other aspects as well.
R.K. Black is AAA NAID certified secure and home to two Certified Secure Destruction Specialists (CSDS). To learn more about our document destruction or shredding services contact us.
Ever hear that expression “Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water?” Well, if you’re going to get rid of a copier without checking the security of the information on its hard drives, you’re going to do exactly that.
You see, the baby in this case is all of those tax documents, human resource files, ID cards, client lists, proposals and other sensitive files that saw the light under the copier lid.
All of those images are stored on the copier in its hard-drive or hard drives — yes, they can have as many as four — and stay there until they are wiped from the drives or the drives are removed.
So when trading in a used piece of office equipment, inquire as to what will be done to protect the data on the hard drives. If you desire, as is the case with some of our clients, have the drives removed and left with you. The dealer should be able to do so for a small fee. But you may not have to go to that measure as the dealer may, as is true at RK Black, as part of its policy, automatically wipe all drives before deploying the copiers to their next sites.
Concerning computer hard drives, make sure to wipe them before disposing of them. As a last measure of protection, whenever you’re looking to hire a shredding company to destroy your paper documents, ask them if they can destroy your hard drives as well.
Often the mobile shredding truck will have a special contraption on board made specifically for hard-drive destruction. The RK Black Shredding truck’s device sends a punch through the hard drive’s casing, through the platters and out the other side, rendering the drive useless. Watch the video above.
To protect yourself, your company and coworkers from a data breach or identity theft, when you think document security, don’t just think of just paper shredding or network firewalls as the only means to ensuring your safety. Think about every piece of equipment bearing a hard-drive in your office. Make sure its wiped or destroyed when it leaves for the last time, because as the saying goes “Dead men tell no tales.”
If you are interested in R.K. Black Shredding, contact us! Also, be sure to keep watching our social media channels on Facebook and Twitter for more business tips from our blog.
Infographic: Documents to keep, documents to destroy and when. Click to download PDF.
For those papers you decide to get rid of, make sure you don’t just throw them away as they may contain sensitive personal, personnel or company information — material you don’t want identity theives or competitors sorting through your trash to get ahold of. Contact a NAID-certified destruction company near you and have them shred your material. If they are anything like us, not only is your infomation shredded in front of your very eyes, the paper is then taken to a plant where it is then recycled and eventually turned into other paper products. See? Not only would you be protecting yourself and your company, but you’ll be helping to protect the environment too.
For those important documents you elect to keep, if they are important enough to store in your filing cabinet, they are likely important enough to digitize and store on a hard drive. Through some document management systems, you can easily store and retrieve your records and even create workflows, streamlining your whole process. But that’s a whole other topic. Click the button at the bottom of this page to learn more about our document management product.
Resources: IRS.gov, BBB.org
