MSNBC's Red Tape Chronicles blog has an alaring post about a man named Hank Gerbus who recently received a disturbing phone call from someone who had just purchased his hard drive.
One year ago, Hank Gerbus had his hard drive replaced at a Best Buy store in Cincinnati. Six months ago, he received one of the most disturbing phone calls of his life.
"Mr. Gerbus," Gerbus recalls a stranger named Ed telling him. "I just bought your hard drive in Chicago."
Gerbus, a 77-year-old retiree, was alarmed. He knew the old hard drive was loaded with his personal information -- his Social Security number, account numbers and details of his retirement investments. But that's not all. The computer also included data on his wife, Roma, and their children and grandchildren, including some of their Social Security numbers.
In June 2005, when Gerbus took his computer to Best Buy for repairs after a hard drive crash, he knew the drive was a potential hot potato. So when a clerk there told him it had to be replaced, he asked for the damaged hardware back.
The article said the clerk was unable to get him the damaged drive, which had been shipped off to a repair center, but promised him it would be destroyed by drilling holes through it. Obviously, it never was. This is a nightmare scenario that is repeating itself these days. The Red Tape Chronicles uncovered several incidents when hardware was not destroyed properly. Then there are the people much less knowledgeable than Hank Gerbus who simply throw out their old computers and laptops making the information on their old hard drives easily accessible to criminals.
