Inactive Company’s Applicant Personal Information Found in Dumpster

"MCALLEN - The local Attorney General’s Office is currently safekeeping personal information that was found in a dumpster.

A viewer notified CHANNEL 5 NEWS he found stacks of folders filled with information of people from the Rio Grande Valley.

David Aguilera Jr. spotted them when he was throwing away posters. He said piles of paper and folders were stacked from the middle to the bottom of the container.

“I was making room to put them in there, and when I moved the box a whole bunch of papers fell and I saw a picture ID of a license,” he said. “I grabbed it and there was another one at the bottom and another one.”

Among the trash were copies of people’s driver’s license and Social Security cards attached to job applications. Most of the paperwork belonged to people out of Brownsville.

Aguilera said the top of the applications listed a company called Millennium Solutions Inc.

CHANNEL 5 NEWS went to visit the address listed on the papers but the building was empty.

However, we later came across a Millennium Solutions Inc.’s social media page. The description said they’re dedicated to selling Time Warner Cable residential services.

Time Warner Cable is now called Charter Spectrum. A spokesperson for the company responded with the following statement:

“The security of personal information is of the outmost importance to us, and we’re looking into the situation.”

We also notified the Texas Attorney General’s Office out of McAllen. They sent an officer to check the dumpster out. The officer wasn’t authorized to do an on-camera interview, but he did say they will have to move the dumpster to a secure location and pick through it by hand to recover all personal information.

Aguilera said he decided to let someone know to save people from the unexpected.

“A lot of my family member’s friends have issues with identity theft. That’s what came to my mind,” he said."

Read the full article here.

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Dangers of Burning Paper

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Regular Document Destruction is More Important than Ever

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