NORWICH – A local woman is working closely with the New York State Attorney General’s Office after discovering garbage bags of unshredded, legible personal documents that were tossed in a dumpster in Norwich.
On July 21, Dona Olsen, owner of Little Mews Rescue, stumbled across the bags in a dumpster she rents out back of her location in the North Plaza in Norwich. Curious and frustrated as to why her dumpster was filling so quickly, Olsen took bags of garbage out of her dumpster that she believed were put there by another tenant.
Through the clear garbage bags on the top of the pile, Olsen said she couldn’t believe what she saw: Intact personal documents with names, addresses, social security numbers and credit information left there by a traveling car dealership based in the Rochester area. The dealership had temporarily set up shop at the North Plaza last month.
“I saw paperwork in there, so I opened it up and saw a list of cars and that kind of stuff,” Olsen said. “On one paper, there was the name of someone who was buying a car with their address ... I didn’t think that kind of information should be in the garbage. It had their social security number, their birthday, where they work, how much money they made – you name it, everything about them.”
Dumbfounded and eager to get word out about what she found, Olsen took to Facebook. She posted a message warning consumers about the dealership and what she called “fly-by-night” practices.
“If that information got into the hands of someone who would use it for identity theft, it could create a lot of problems for somebody,” she said. “I wanted to let people know they couldn’t trust this (car) dealership.”
Olsen’s Facebook post was shared among friends until it reached Sherburne resident Kim Shapley, whose son had just purchased a car from the dealership. Shapley contacted Olsen and the two discovered that Shapley’s son was among those whose information was in the bags of trash – and still legible.
“I was very pissed,” Shapley said. “We went through the dumpster and we sorted through, and that’s when we found a copy of his driver’s license and copies of his bank, and that’s when I realized I needed to take this another step further.”
Shapley called the dealership – Vision Nissan of Webster – and said that while it was willing to send a representative back to Norwich to straighten out banking information related her son’s purchase, she claimed it had little to offer in respect to the documents she found in the dumpster.
