You've probably made copies of your tax forms, your driver's license or legal documents thinking you'd put them away in a filing cabinet and no one else would ever see them. Think again. These days, many digital copy machines have hard drives. If someone knows what they're doing, they can get their hands on your personal information and steal your identity.
We caught Stacy Piggee on her way to make some copies of personal court documents. "It's a little mind blowing," she said. "You never think about what your copying, think that something else is holding onto it."
Like most people we talked to, she had no idea digital copiers have hard drives. And thinking back on all the things she's copied she got a little concerned. "I've had to make copies of my income tax return, things dealing with my divorce, I mean it has my social on it," she told us.
If someone got that information they could easily steal your identity too. Bob Eager owns a Kwik Kopy location in West Little Rock. He sets his hard drives so that they eliminate information as soon as the copies are made. It's one step he takes to protect his customers.
He said, "I have documents that are very secure that I do for a lot of organizations where you would assume that security. CPA's for instance, lawyers."
But what if that information is not deleted immediately? The average copy machine hard drive can store anywhere from 9,000 to 100,000 documents. And experts say chances are, if you're copying digitally, your information is being stored.
Tim Jacob with Modern Image Systems in Little Rock said, "You can almost bet that you are. They can all scan that document and keep it in memory."
Jacob says the hard drive storage can be a great asset if you need to retrieve documents you've lost. Software available allows you to copy your information from the hard drive and transfer it to your computer. There's also a feature that lets you store and access frequently used documents like fax cover sheets or expense forms used around an office.
Mr. Jacob says there are safeguards to prevent that from happening, and it starts with common sense. First, make sure you don't scan and save something into that easy access recall feature if you don't want everyone to see it. And if you don't want anyone to use the fancy software we mentioned to access your documents on the hard drive, another type of software can essentially scramble the information.
"It covers up that image with x's and o's, and just overwrites the document so it can not be read," Jacob explained.
You can also rest a little easier knowing that it would take an expert to physically get to the hard drive and yank it out of a copier. It took a professional repair man we talked to about 5 minutes to access it. But the bottom line is, if you're afraid your information could be getting stored on a hard drive, ask before you copy.
Attorney General Dustin McDaniel says the punishment for identity theft is stiff in Arkansas. But ultimately, prevention can save a lot of headaches. "The victim is going to spend hundreds of hours trying to restore their credit and may never get their money back," McDaniel told us.
Attorney General McDaniel says Arkansas recently increased its punishments for identity theft against the disabled and the elderly. In those cases, offenders can go to jail from 5 to 20 years and pay a $15,000 fine. McDaniel hasn't seen any cases like this in Arkansas, but he says he's never shocked by the ways crooks try to steal people's identities. And new innovations in technology provide more methods to do that.
