Auto Dealerships Need Document Shredding Services
When someone buys or leases a new car, the majority of the time they finance the transaction. To get the necessary financing, people have to provide banks or credit unions with a lot of personal information. Identity thieves know this and often target car dealerships as a place they can steal a consumer’s information to use it for their nefarious acts.
Car dealerships need to collect a lot of information
Auto dealerships collect the personal information of their customers like income, where they work, where they bank, driver’s license numbers, social security numbers, and insurance information. That information is collected in many ways by individual salespeople, finance managers, and business managers. Sometimes forms are completed, or some information will be taken on a notepad. Many times, photocopies are made of driver’s licenses, credit cards, and other documents.
Why identity thieves target auto dealerships
It’s a simple answer. It can be an easy place to get all the information they need to set up phony accounts or get access to the personal accounts of your customers.
Your showroom can have leaks
Your dealership showroom has been set up to be inviting to customers so they can come in anytime you are open to see and sit in a car they are considering purchasing. Seeing and touching the cars you have available is an invaluable sales tool. Every showroom is full of salesmen with desks everywhere so that your sales staff can invite customers to sit down and talk about buying or leasing a new car. These desks are where a lot of personal information is given to your staff, and if it isn’t handled in a secure manner it could lead to information leaks.
Privacy laws apply to auto dealerships
Privacy laws require dealerships to take reasonable steps to protect confidential information. Since car dealers collect a customer’s financial information, they must adhere to federal and state privacy laws. Compliance with these regulations applies to the handling, storage, and disposal of this information.
How to protect your dealership and your customers
Train Your Staff – Confirm that your staff is aware of the need to protect all information. Make sure that nothing is left on top of their desks when they are not there. When they don’t need a document anymore, they need to dispose of it in a secure fashion. That means any piece of paper, including notepads. Provide your staff with secure containers to dispose of all documents. Never put any documents in the regular trash. Never release information to anyone they don’t know.
Hire a Professional Shredding Service – Let an experienced document destruction company help you set up a shredding program so it will be easy for your staff to comply with your information protection program. The shredding service will provide your dealership with all of the necessary security containers to be placed throughout your showroom and offices so all your staff will be just steps away from placing documents in a locked container. Then the shredding service will come to your dealership on a regular schedule to empty and securely destroy the contents.
FileShred is a locally owned document shredding and hard drive destruction service in Connecticut that will help you implement the best information destruction program for your firm. Give us a call or visit our website at www.fileshred.net.
