Dumpster Diving

Dumpster diving — also called bin raiding or refuse theft in the UK — involves sorting through discarded waste to recover documents, devices, or other items containing personal or financial information. For individuals, this can include bank statements, utility bills, pre-approved credit card offers, medical correspondence, payslips, and old credit or debit cards. For businesses, the same technique may target discarded printouts, old hard drives, IT equipment, or internal documents.

The information recovered is used to build identity profiles for synthetic identity fraud, to answer account-recovery security questions, to conduct pretexting calls to banks or service providers, or to directly apply for credit in the victim's name. Dumpster diving requires no technical skill and operates in what is often a legal grey area — in many jurisdictions, rubbish placed in a public bin is considered abandoned property.

Effective countermeasures include shredding all documents containing personal information before disposal (cross-cut or micro-cut shredders are preferable to strip-cut), wiping or physically destroying storage devices before discarding hardware, and opting for paperless billing and statements where possible.