As Connecticut reels from multiple cases of identity theft, a Pennsylvania company plans to begin installing “vaults” in commercial and public buildings in Fairfield County to destroy sensitive documents and electronics.
ShredStation also has awarded a franchise to a Fairfield businessman to begin operating a home pickup service.
As is the case with FedEx drop boxes, ShredStation”™s vaults sit on commercial properties or in building lobbies. After swiping a credit card, one can dump into the vault up to 250 pages of material slated for destruction.
Late last month, the company indicated it would also begin licensing “e-media” vaults that accept computers, cell phones and other electronic devices for destruction.
The customer receives a receipt at the deposit location and via the Internet once the material has been destroyed. For its document shredding services, the company has been charging $5 per deposit.
ShredStation analyzed whether to place portable shredders in buildings, but rejected the idea as prohibitively expensive and difficult to maintain, according to Al Villamil, who founded the Bensalem, Pa.-based company.
Instead, when a vault is nearly full the container sends an alert to ShredStation over AT&T Wireless Inc.”™s network and the company dispatches a truck to the location, which carts the refuse away to be destroyed and recycled.
ShredStation makes arrangements with independent document destruction companies to service the vaults; Villamil said he has inked such contracts in Fairfield County, but declined to name vendors, citing security considerations.
There is competition. Large operations like Iron Mountain Inc. and Securit subsidiary Shred-It (whose founder died in a plane crash last month) have Connecticut operations. Locally based shredding companies include City Confidential Shredding of Darien; Secure Eco Shred of Brookfield; and Security Shredding Inc. of Westport.
To realize its vision, ShredStation will need effective partnerships with businesses and organizations to get its vaults onto their premises. Villamil said he hopes to negotiate access to the properties of large real estate owners similar to Stamford-based Antares Investment Partners or Shelton-based Robert D. Scinto Inc., which have large commercial holdings in Fairfield County.
Meanwhile, he thinks the vaults will act as billboards for home-pickup franchisees like Bob Nichols, who are using vans to round up documents, rather than expensive shredding trucks.
“Other companies are route-based,” Villamil said. “They really don”™t want to stop by your house with their $250,000 truck and pick up your four boxes.”
Business people with home offices have not been without options; most communities schedule shredding services at transfer stations; Lakewood, Colo.-based DataGuard USA offers a mail-shredding service, charging $25 for a FedEx home pickup of a box with up to 30 pounds of documents.
Most often, however, home offices are manually shredding documents themselves.
“I have a home shredder; you have a home shredder,” Nichols said. “I think people are fed up with feeding six pages at a time into a home shredder.”
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ShredStation has pounced on every opportunity to showcase the limitations of do-it-yourself solutions. In partnership with Staples Inc., the company offered free shredding services following the 2007 tax season.
And after a hauler found nude photos of a star of “Desperate Housewives” Marcia Cross while picking up her garbage, ShredStation offered Cross a lifetime of free shredding services, as well as a year of free shredding services for any Los Angeles publicist.
While the Cross episode or the August theft of a Connecticut Department of Revenue laptop computer grab headlines, Villamil said many small businesses are not mindful of the onus placed on them by regulations such as the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act.
“The amazing thing about this industry is that the Avon lady ”¦ has the same (identity-theft) compliance laws that IBM or ExxonMobil has,” Villamil said. “But the Avon lady probably doesn”™t even understand the implications of her actions.”
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