How to Shred Old Credit Card Offers
Shredding credit card offers, especially pre-approval offers, is very important in the age of dumpster diving to gain personal information. Fraudsters will dig through dumpsters and piece together information about the people in your household in order to commit identity theft. Even tearing these offers to pieces may not be enough, as they can simply piece them together---like a puzzle---and send them off.
Other People Are Reading
Instructions
-
-
1
Choose a shredder. You have two types to choose from: strip cutters and cross cutters. Cross cutters cut the paper from both directions, and creates many small pieces of paper that can be hard to piece together. As the name implies, strip cutters cut your document into several strips that are the length of your original document. Cross cutters are the best choice.
-
2
Stick your application in through the slit at the top of the shredder. Provided your shredder is plugged in, it should begin shredding automatically. If you have to use a strip cutter, stick the document in with the shortest side down, so that it is creating more, and smaller, pieces. So, if you are shedding a nine inch by five inch credit card application, stick it in so that the five inch side is down and goes in first. This way you will get several five inch strips of paper, instead of several nine inch slips of paper.
-
-
3
Throw the pieces away in separate trash cans for extra security. For example, put half the pieces in your kitchen trash and half the pieces in your bedroom trash. This lessens the chance that all of the pieces will be set out on the same trash day.
-
1
