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Personal Information for Sale – 60 Boxes in Stock NOW!

December 26, 2008 – 2:08 pm

Sometimes I wonder how identity thieves get their hands on personal information like social security and banking account numbers. Then stories like this one from Maine remind me of how naive people can be when it comes to protecting one’s identity. A storage facility in Scarborough Maine was prepared to sell the contents of a storage unit that contained 60 boxes of financial records. The Storage unit belonged to a mortgage brokerage that didn’t pay its bill. The mortgage brokerage had gone out a business, like 50 others in Maine in the last year, and somewhat abandoned the documents.

This is not the first time that a storage facility has tried to sell of personal information to the public. There have been at least two other documented cases of this happening in Maine. It’s legal in Maine for the storage facilities to sell sensitive data or whatever they want to the highest bidder if the client has not paid its bill.

The storage facility is not required to inventory the contents of the container before selling it. They do have to inform the owner of the sale and post the sale in the local paper for 2 weeks but after that they can sell whatever they want. Maine does have a data-breach notification law but this law does not apply to storage facilities.

Fortunately for the previous clients of the mortgage brokerage the Maine Bureau of Consumer Credit stepped in and got a court order to confiscate the records. The mortgage brokerage was ultimately responsible for maintaining the records however it’s difficult to blame a company that is no long in business.

It seems that it becomes easier and easier to obtain personal financial information. If the owners of the storage facilities had not called the authorities for advice on what to do with the information, hundreds of identities would have been at risk. If the owners were greedy, or just lazy, they might of just sold the information rather than dealing with it. In Maine this would have been perfectly legal for the storage facilities to do and they wouldn’t be held responsible for any identity theft that resulted.

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