What’s in your Dumpster?
Posted on Tuesday, September 11, 2007
BENTONVILLE — When families and individuals insure their homes, automobiles and other possessions, they place trust in the hands of the agent they select. Personal information — Social Security number, checking-account codes, credit-card information, driver’s license information and more — are forever filed away in the agent’s office.
For a number of people here in northwest Arkansas, that trust has been betrayed.
When a downtown Bentonville businessman showed up for work on Sept. 4, he and his employees noticed their outside trash bin filled with materials that didn’t come from their business. He became suspicious when he saw a few of the folders had the word “ confidential” printed across the front. Opening one, he was blown away by what he found.
The file contained voided checks with the account and tracking numbers clearly visible, phone numbers, home-loan information, credit and personal identification numbers and more. The businessman had stumbled across what an identity thief would refer to as the jackpot. There were thousands of files and documents, accounting for hundreds of clients who entrusted their personal information to former Farmer’s Insurance agent Greg Wolfe, who most recently had an office on a second-story floor on the Bentonville Square.
Wolfe’s employment was terminated about a month ago, according to Farmer’s Insurance district manager Travis Kershner, who oversees all northwest Arkansas agents.
Wolfe was handed his termination notice in Bentonville by Farmer’s Insurance Arkansas Director Charlie Snyder. Normally, when an agent is terminated, the client files are immediately removed. But for reasons Farmer’s Insurance would not discuss, client files were not removed from Wolfe’s office, which had moved from Rogers to Bentonville within the last year.
“ This agent was terminated, and it did not end on good terms, ” Kershner said. “ I’m extremely disappointed that those personal files were thrown in a Dumpster. We’ve never had this happen before. Something like this has never been an issue.
“ We will notify his clients that they’ve been assigned to a new agent, and I’ll seek advice from my superiors. One of the things we preach at this company is protecting clients from identity theft. So a situation like this is the last thing we want. ”
The Bentonville businessman immediately removed the files from the trash bin and called the Farmer’s Insurance Help Point line at its Los Angeles-based headquarters to tell the company where it could pick up the documents. A week later, no Farmer’s Insurance representative had come to recover the files. The Daily Record called the corporate office in Los Angeles on Monday. When that call was not returned, The Daily Record called the regional Farmer’s Insurance office in Fayetteville, when Kershner said corporate never relayed the message those personal files had been found.
“ We’ve been trying to contact Mr. Wolfe for the past couple of weeks, and his numbers have been disconnected, ” Kershner said. We haven’t been able to find him. We had no idea he had just dumped these important files. I would imagine there could be some charges brought against him, but since he was terminated prior to this, I’ll have to check into that. ”
On Monday, within a few hours of learning about the files, a representative from Kershner’s office in Fayetteville drove to Bentonville.
“ We’ve tried our best to find Mr. Wolfe and the files, ” Snyder said on Monday. “ I want to assure our customers this is not how Farmer’s Insurance operates. This agent was not abiding by the terms of his contract. ”
There’s no way of knowing if anyone who came upon the trash bin saw the files, took documents or wrote down confidential information.
The Federal Trade Commission reports that for the fourth consecutive year, identity theft topped the list of consumer complaints in the United States. Identity theft accounted for more than 42 percent of all complaints lodged in the FTC Consumer Sentinel database in 2004, and that number has risen to more than 50 percent today.
According to the FTC’s Identity Theft Survey Report, approximately 10 million American consumers discovered that their personal information had been used to open fraudulent bank, credit card or utility accounts, or used to commit other crimes. More than 50 percent of identitytheft victims were the victims of credit card and other types of account fraud. New account fraud, where an ID thief opens up new accounts in a person’s name, and other frauds were estimated to have victimized 3. 23 million people. Trash bins are listed among the most popular sources of identity theft.
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online
