The internet is hugely useful for many different things. For instance, we now have access to more information than ever before, thanks to internet services. The internet provides connectivity in the United States and around the world, and has become an essential and vital tool for work as well as for leisure. However, the internet is not without its dangers, and this easy access to information certainly has its negative side, there’s no doubt about it. For instance, identity theft is becoming more prevalent and more of a problem than ever before and it is important to take steps to prevent it, such as taking advantage of document shredding services, as frequently as you are able to.
Identity theft is a very serious problem here in the United States, and it is unfortunately on the rise. In fact, between the years of 2015 and 2016, a span of time that is just one single year, the instances of identity theft that were seen in this country rose by more than fifteen percent (sixteen percent, to be exact) and by the time that the year of 2016 had officially drawn to a close, it was estimated that at least one adult person living in the United States out of every sixteen adult people had become a victim of identity theft for the first time – or even for a second time or a third time, unfortunate as that may be.
Identity theft is a problem that has become particularly prevalent in the online world, for businesses and for individual people alike. For instance, this can clearly be seen by the fact that as many as three hundred and twelve data breaches happened to businesses located all throughout the United States in the year of 2015 alone, leaving an impact on millions of people’s lives as a result. And medical facilities also suffered a great deal of data breaches – as many as two hundred and seventy seven again – which affected more than one hundred million people by the time that the breach had become controlled again. And identity theft is expensive for both businesses and their consumers, costing, in total, as much as fifty billion dollars per every single year here in the United States alone. And corporate identity theft alone here in the United States can cost nearly as much as forty eight billion dollars throughout the time span of just one year.
But though much of data breaches and identity theft occurs online, identity theft from print documents is still far from uncommon and is absolutely not obsolete in any way, shape, or form. In fact, as any document shredding services can tell you, print based identity theft is thriving here in the United States as well as many other places around the world. Data even shows that identity theft is still more common among print based sources of it, accounting for as much as ninety percent of all cases of identity theft here in the United States, a big percentage to say the least.
Fortunately, there are steps that you and your family can take to begin to combat the risks of identity theft – and the long lasting consequences that even just one instance of identity theft can lead to. Document shredding services make up a big part of this prevention against identity theft, with local shredding companies offering document shredding services like paper shredding services and even a one time document purge, depending on what it is that you need, of course. While it might seem like document shredding services won’t do that much to prevent identity theft in the world of technology, they can ensure with nearly one hundred percent certainty that any physical copies of documents that you have but are looking to dispose of will not end up in the wrong hands. For this reason and more, document shredding services in the United States are on the front line of identity theft prevention methods, even as technology advances and identity theft becomes a more complicated problem than ever before in our history as a country.