Improper disposal of hundreds of loan applications raises security concerns

A cleaning crew mistakenly tossed the unshredded documents in a garbage bin

PLEASANT HILL — The financial and personal details of about 300 property-loan applicants were compromised when confidential documents were mistakenly tossed into an outdoor waste bin.

The paperwork, belonging to FHG Finance, a home loan business at 548 Contra Costa Blvd., was discarded last week by a cleaning crew hired to clear out a portion of the building where FHG is based, an official at the business said.

The documents, which contained bank account and Social Security numbers, were found by employees at a neighboring store, who alerted FHG. The company secured the trash bin with a padlock until the documents could be shredded.

Broker Walter Rook, vice president of FHG, described it as a close call.

"It definitely could have caused problems "... from any of these people who go bin diving, looking for account information," Rook said.

Rook said his business used to share space with another loan company, which closed more than a year ago.

He had accumulated at least 32 boxes of old documents that he stored in the vacated space, in preparation to shred them.The documents represented about 300 clients from 2003 to 2007. "You have to hold them for three years before you can destroy them," he said.

But Rook was unprepared April 28, when the building's owner hired a crew to clean out the vacated space.
The two cleaners came into Lamps Plus and asked store manager Rachel Rainey if they could throw several boxes of paper into the store's outdoor recycling bin. She gave permission.

After the men left, another employee noticed the recycled documents were loan applications. They included copies of driver's licenses and credit reports, Rainey said.

"The loan applications were very, very detailed," she said. "Every single thing you can think of to start a loan."

Concerned about the apparent mishandling of the documents, Rainey alerted Rook.

"If the Lamps Plus people wouldn't have told me, I would have never known," he said. "Thank God they came over."

Too late in the business day to do anything more, Rook put a padlock on the recycling bin and fretted through the night about the sensitive contents inside.

In the morning, the bin was emptied and a Walnut Creek shredding company destroyed all of the contents.

But later that day, Lamps Plus employees found several more boxes of loan documents in a nearby garbage bin.

"We did the right thing and decided to shred the rest of the papers ourselves," Rainey said.

The activity took eight hours.

The Times could not contact the owner of the property, who Rook said was out of the country. The property management company, Central Real Estate, did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Typically, businesses that share office space are notified by the owner or property management company when entry will be made and cleaning will be done, said Amy Callaghan, a property manager at Colliers International in Walnut Creek.

"To just call someone and say, 'dump whatever you see in there,' it's not a standard procedure," she said. "But every owner handles things differently."
insidebayarea.com