Identity fraud can be a very frightening thing, there is certainly no doubt about this. After all, preventing identity fraud can be a difficult task, all things considered, and it is actually far more common than many people even realize. Preventing identity fraud has become even more complex and multi-faceted nowadays, thanks to the advent of cyber crime, something that has been growing in recent years as the internet and its usage has become much more accessible, mainstream, and largely commonplace in highly developed countries like the United States.

In many cases, the best way to combat identity fraud is through knowledge. Knowing what the risks of identity fraud are is key to preventing it from happening to you. Understanding how identity fraud happens – and how it happens most frequently – is also hugely important. Fortunately, these key pieces of information are becoming more commonly known than ever before, something that is likely to bring down rates of identity fraud and cyber crime alike (at least hopefully) in the years that are to come here in the United States and beyond it as well.

First, let’s look at the scope and scale of identity fraud. Here in the United States, there were more than 16.5 victims of such crimes throughout the one year of 2017 alone, now only a couple of years in the past. And nearly one full fourth of these victims only ever discovered that they were victims in the first place accidentally. This tells us, of course, that knowing your state of affairs regarding identity fraud is incredibly important at all times.

It’s also important that your business or place of work is aware of the risks of identity fraud as well. Fortunately, this is typically the case, as data that has been gathered on the subject shows that most top executives have ranked the matter of identity fraud in the top five issues that businesses are facing. This means, of course, that such executives are more likely than ever before to implement ways to prevent identity fraud from occurring in the working world.

One way to do this is through the use of an industrial office shredder. An industrial office shredder is the perfect place to discard of important documents and the regular use of and industrial shredder machine can help to ensure, through the process of secure paper shredding, that the potential for identity theft is diminished considerably, if not eliminated entirely. And using an industrial office shredder or other such commercial paper shredder is actually important from a business standpoint as well.

If a preventative step like buying an industrial office shredder is not taken, then identity theft becomes much more likely. And when identity theft on any scale occurs and customers and consumers of the company find out about it, business is likely to be lost. In fact, the data more than backs this up, showing that as many as 40% of all current customers would quickly cease to do business with any given brand – no matter how cherished or well liked – if a security breach happened with that brand.

Fortunately, the use of the industrial office shredder can help to prevent this from ever happening – or at least drastically reduce the chances of it happening. But when looking for the right industrial office shredder, the high capacity paper shredder should likely be considered above all else, due to the sheer amount of documents that any given company is likely to generate, particularly if a paper filing system of some sort is still in place. When such a high capacity industrial office shredder is able to be used, it greatly reduces the chances of any documents slipping through the cracks, so to speak, something that can often become a very real problem.

Fortunately, awareness surrounding identity theft is something that is making people take more precautions than ever before, both on a personal level as well as a professional one. Even just shredding documents with an industrial office shredder can make an impact.