This weekend news broke in the Dallas area that Irving area school teachers had their personal information compromised.
From Dallas Morning News:
Irving school officials now say that identity thieves obtained the names and Social Security numbers of 3,400 teachers and other employees contained in an old benefits report and then used the information to make thousands of dollars in purchases.
District security director Pat Lamb said a woman charged in the case said the information came from a list of names pulled out of a trash bin.
“We still do not know how our records were compromised,” said Lamb, who mentioned that his own name was on the list. “We don’t know if somebody was supposed to shred that information, but it ended up in a Dumpster.”
The school district’s policy requires following a schedule for properly destroying records.
I find it interesting that the assumption is that the employee records were compromised due to papers ending up in a dumpster. Was this statement a slip by the spokesperson? The US Secret Service and US Marshals are involved in the case which makes me wonder if the information ended up in a dumpster at all.
At least 64 of the affected people on the list have come forward as having had their identities stolen. This number will most likely grow as other teachers check on their own credit reports.
For the full article read on.