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After years of servicing the GTA, we’ve realized that besides shredding, we enjoy learning about you – our customers! With each mobile truck full of destroyed documents we take away, we learn a bit more about your stories and how you discovered our document destruction services. No matter how long we stay in business, it’s always hard to hear when a particular individual hired our services only after they were the victim of identity theft.

It’s unfortunate that our customers have learned the hard way just how necessary proper document disposal is, especially considering how easy it can be to avoid with our help. Recovering from identity theft is certainly no picnic, as many of our customers can attest. This is why we’ve compiled easy-to-follow tips should you (or someone you know) ever suspect your personal information is being used by another person.

Your first course of action is to alert the authorities, institutions, and other financial organizations with which you have accounts. Filing a report with the police will act as proof that a crime has been committed and their official report can be used should financial institutions and creditors need verification of the incident. Next up, you have to get into contact with your bank, if they don’t already know of the suspicious activity in your accounts. Outlining what activity is fraudulent (so you’re not held responsible) and flagging your account is just as important as cancelling your credit cards and resetting passwords to other accounts.

While doing this, you should inform different branches of the government about your circumstances.  When you speak with Service Canada, you can notify them of your predicament and reissue new federal and provincial documents and identifications, like your Social Insurance Number (SIN) and Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP). By checking with Canada Post, you can ensure that none of your mail (particularly letters documenting your financial account information) is being redirected to another address. Finally, you should contact the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre (CAFC) for additional resources and tips.

The next step is to obtain a credit report from a nationally accredited bureau, such as Equifax. With their report, you can review the activity made under your name in accounts of which you weren’t aware. From there, you can close those accounts that you didn’t authorize and refuse applications for other accounts for which you didn’t ask. You should also request a fraud warning be put on your account. This will stay on your account for six years, which will warn future credit grantors that you were a victim of fraud.

Once you’ve flagged the appropriate files, cancelled fraudulent accounts, and alerted the right organizations, you can move onto the most important step – taking preventative measures to stop this from ever happening again. Identity thieves didn’t magically learn your account numbers, contact information, and passwords without help. They were able to find these things by sorting through the old paper and digital records that you didn’t think twice about throwing away. By eliminating these prime sources confidential information, you’re stopping identity theft at its source.

Our mobile shredding services will effectively destroy all of the paper and digital documents that can potentially be used against you to open fraudulent accounts and ruin your credit scores. We have the right tools for the job, so we can guarantee your old mail and account papers will never fall into the wrong hands again. Our guarantee is important to us. The reason why we got into this business is to protect customers like you from ever having to go through this long process we just explained. If you’re ready to schedule another purge for your household’s or business’ records, or if you just want to say hello, send off an email today!