It’s no secret that identity theft represents a real and growing threat to the safety of the UK public in general. Nevertheless, criminals are constantly refining their approaches and techniques to ripping off the identities of others, meaning that just as soon as you think you have all bases covered, chances are you’re still wide open in one way or another.
Up and down the country, there’s a growing problem with identity theft – originating from the various scrap yards spanning the nation. Not at the hands of those running the scrap yards of course, but rather the unscrupulous types who’ve realised that gaining access to the personal information of other people can often be as easy as accessing the scrap yard.
In the case of scrap yards that deal directly with the public, it is often possible to pay a fee and basically have free run of the yard to find and summarily pull out/pay for anything you need. Unfortunately, when cars are scrapped either in the wake of an accident or simply having reached the end of their usable lives, a worrying proportion of former owners don’t make nearly enough effort to fully clear their cars out. As such, it’s not uncommon to find anything and everything from bank statements to utility bills to expired credit cards and more – all of which have the potential to fall right into the hands of anyone within reach of the scrapped cars. 
So it’s a pretty simple scenario to sum up really – if you’re planning to scrap a car by way of a junkyard and would prefer your identity not to fall into the wrong hands, you might want to make sure you don’t leave a gift or two in the vehicles.
Safe and Sound
Here at Take My Scrap Car, things are a little different as rather than stacking the thousands of scrap cars to be sold on in pieces, we’re all about recycling. When you come to us – or more accurately when we come to you – we take your car away for the purposes of stripping it down, chopping it to pieces and generally getting it ready for the recycling plant. As such, not only do we personally go through each car meticulously during the process, but after the car is passed onto us, that’s pretty much the end of the story – nobody else gets their hands on it.
The way we see it, it’s far more important to put as many cars as possible back into the system as recycled metal than it is to just leave them out to rust and rot on huge piles up and down the country. We know scrap yards play a valuable role in getting motorists what they need, but at the same time the UK as a whole is massively dependent on our recycling efforts.
So once again – if you do plan to hand your old car over for scrapping, or in any way sell it/give it away for that matter, you might want to think carefully about whether or not you’ve left anything a little too personal or revealing…just in case!
