Identity theft alert!
Photo copiers, printers, scanners have hard drives in them just like a computer. Every document you print, scan, or fax, could be stored on a hard drive inside your copier. When you decide to get rid of it, there could be a hard drive in there with all your information for someone to steal. Watch the CBS video here.
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6412572n
To protect your identity you should have two things in place:
1. Get a Prepaid legal membership with identity theft coverage. I recommend my good friend Liana. Find more info about her at http://www.prepaidlegal.com/hub/liana
2. Destroy information on your hard drives inside your copiers, scanners, etc either physically before throwing away your old machine, or shredding the hard drive, physically or digitally. Even formatting the hard drive isn’t enough, since I do data recovery’s for a living too and recover data from formatted drives. Just yesterday I recovered 100 photos from someones camera card that they formatted before they gave me. Of course they asked me to do it for them.
Treat copiers/scanners the same as you do a computer. Get rid of your history on the hard drive before giving away or tossing the computer, scanner, or copier.
It’s one thing to save money, but it’s gonna cost you more if the information falls into the wrong hands. Your house and home and life as you know it could be ruined, no exaggeration what so ever. Ask a legal expert you trust and don’t take my word for it.