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Picking Up the Pieces
ravenousbugblatter writes "The New York Times online ran an article yesterday titled Picking up the pieces that talks about new technology that can recover information from shredded documents. Not only can companies scan strip-shredded paper and recover the information, they can do the same with cross-shredded paper. It comes at a price though - one company charges $8,000-$10,000 to "reconstruct" the information in a cubic foot of cross-shredded material. How's it done? The shreds are glued onto a piece of paper and then scanned. Software then looks for matches (in one case using the pattern of ink at the edges of the pieces) and suggests possible combinations to the operator that can be accepted or rejected."
From your bank statement can be gleaned your name, address, account number, bank name, and recent check #s... from there, all it takes is a routing # and that's enough information to print a check. I've had creditors and whatnot run checks on their own stock before, and no bank I've ever used has ever complained, so it's not much of a stretch for a thief to cook up a good sounding name for the payable-to field that he could deposit. Not that I imagine your bank (or mine) reads all those payable-to fields, anyway.