Potential for huge ID theft averted

Jen Lawson

Wednesday, April 28, 2004 | 9:16 a.m.

Employees of a self-storage complex on Craig Road near Nellis Boulevard are being credited for averting what could have been a major case of identity theft involving hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting people from around the country.

"We were overwhelmed by the (number of) possible identities that could have been stolen," Sgt. Ed Kravetz of Metro Police's fraud section said Tuesday while standing outside Craig/Nellis Self Storage at 5250 E. Craig Road.

About a year ago a telemarketing company rented two storage units at a self storage center and filled them with boxes holding 269 binders containing paperwork showing names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers of people in different states.

Police said they didn't know the name of the telemarketing company, but it apparently is out of business and may have already quit operating at the time it filled the storage units.

The company never paid its rental fee of $123 a month, and the property in the 10-by-10-foot units was deemed abandoned a few weeks ago. That led to storage facility employee Bethany Diggs cutting the locks on the units and trying to figure out what to do with the contents.

Typically the storage facility tries to auction off abandoned property, but they couldn't do that in this case, Diggs said.

Not knowing what else to do, they called Metro.

"We just wanted to make sure that the information didn't get into the wrong hands," Diggs said.

Kravetz praised the employees for fulfilling "the moral obligation to call Metro."

"The storage company could have thrown it away," he said, and the documents could have been found by identity thieves. The information in the paperwork was sufficient to steal the identities of hundreds of thousands of people, he said.

"In order to prevent further identity theft, they called us."

Lt. Steve Franks, head of the fraud and forgery section, asked Bob Linden, president of Shred-It, if he could do the shredding free of charge as a community service.

Linden brought a mobile industrial paper shredder to the storage facility Tuesday. Shred-It employees loaded boxes on a cart and wheeled them to the truck outside, where it turned thousands of pounds of paper into small scraps.

"You can't have this kind of thing (the identity information) out on the street," he said over the roar of the machine, which is capable of shredding 1,500 to 5,000 pounds of paper per hour. Linden estimated it would take three to five hours to destroy all of the paper in the units.

It would have cost Metro "an enormous amount of money" to get the papers shredded without help from Shred-It, Kravetz said.