If a fraudster can secure sufficient information about a business and the individuals within it, they may be able to successfully apply for company credit cards and accounts, by convincing the organisations involved that there are a genuine member of staff.
Corporate identities can also be stolen, according to recent government research conducted by Business Link. They warn that it may be possible to submit forms to Companies House that will change the registered address of a business or even appoint new company directors.
This means that they could open a business bank account, take out loans and order goods to be delivered; potentially ruining the credit rating of the business.
One way in which criminals can get their hands on company information is by trawling through discarded or recycled hard drives. Some organisations renew their systems as often as every other year and old PC's are not always disposed of securely.
Obtaining one of these hard drives is an experienced fraudsters dream, as they will be able to find a variety of useable information for their ‘latest scam', even if the previous owner believed they have wiped the contents.
The only way to be sure of avoiding this is to forensically wipe the data from the hard drive. This has the major benefit that it allows the hard drive to be reused. If it is resold, then some of the cost of ownership can be recovered and, in addition, the recycling of the product will have obvious benefits to the environment.
A data wiping service will use sophisticated forensic techniques to completely overwrite all information on the hard drive. It is recommended by the government to wipe clean the hard drive before it is discarded, sold, or donated as a security measure.
This would need to be carried out by a professional organisation as, contrary to popular belief, simply formatting hard drives does not erase any of the information stored on the machine. Similarly, the process of manually ''deleting'' files only removes information about how to locate the file on your drive. The contents remain hidden and safely stored until they are overwritten and, even then, traces of the data often still remain.
The solution for unrecoverable erasure and, consequently, protection from fraud is to ''wipe'' the file or drive. It is a repetitive process of overwriting all 1's, then all 0's over the file contents. This process must be conducted using forensically approved techniques.set by the Department of Defence and are recommended for all recycled machines that have been used by businesses or where important financial and personal information has been stored.