Editor's Focus--Making the Case

Alert business owners are always mindful of current events that may be used to publicize the value of their services. For owners and executives of information destruction firms, the first half of 2005 has provided a bonanza of current event tie-ins:

• In February, information broker ChoicePoint LLC disclosed that the financial information of some 150,000 people may have been made available to an identity thief who used nothing more than some bogus faxed documents to gain access.

• Also in February, Bank of America revealed that a back-up tape with account information for nearly 1 million government employees—reportedly including members of Congress—was lost in shipment.

• DSW Shoe Warehouse disclosed in March that a security breach may have left the credit card numbers of almost 1 million people unprotected.

• An individual employee and one accomplice used membership applications at a Blockbuster Video store in Washington, D.C., to fraudulently use credit cards to buy some $100,000 worth of merchandise and gift cards.

• In early April, a storage company truck drove through downtown Cleveland with its back door swinging open, allowing a box full of medical records to escape into the street. Some records ended up in the hands of a local newspaper reporter, who published edited examples of the type of information that was included.

• In early May, some 600,000 current and former Time-Warner employees learned that data tapes containing personnel records (including Social Security numbers) were lost en route to a storage facility.