|
|
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE |
|
State
Rep. Mike McGeehan |
  
|
10,000 ways to guard against identity thieves and help the environment
PHILADELPHIA, May 6 – State Rep. Mike McGeehan, D-Phila., was buried in five tons of shredded paper Saturday, and many people in his district are more financially secure because of it.
For the third year, McGeehan sponsored a document-shredding event so constituents could safely dispose of documents with personal and financial information and the response was record-breaking. According to Bob Leventhal of Titan Mobile Shredding, the 10,000 pounds that residents brought for shredding was a company record for a single-truck event – filling the truck to capacity.
In addition to helping people protect their accounts and credit records, the five tons of documents will be recycled for use in other paper products.
The event was to last from 9 a.m. to noon at the Holmesburg Recreation Center, but the public response kept the industrial shredding machine humming for an extra hour and a half.
McGeehan said his message is definitely getting out, that the best way for people to prevent personal financial and medical information from falling into the wrong hands is to shred it, rather than throwing them intact into the household trash. Identity thieves often look through household trash for information they can use to access credit and bank accounts.
"It’s satisfying to know that we are protecting so many people from one of the major avenues of identity theft by chewing up documents with credit and bank account numbers, health records and Social Security numbers," said McGeehan, a major proponent in the General Assembly for laws to enhance identity theft protection for consumers.
"Next year, we’ll have two trucks."
###jp/2008/bfg
l:'print'releases'shredresults.173
Attention Editors: Two photographs of the event and captions are available at www.pahouse.com/mediacenter through the media search box.
|
|