Carefully check the items that you plan to donate.

This is yet another weird thread. As some of you know I'm a thrift/resale store enthusiast. You'd be amazed at some of the personal papers I find, usually stashed in books, but in other places as well.

I've found home loan applications that contained just abut all the information an identity thief would ever need (yes, I know that these days most ID theft is done digitally). The owner of the resale shop said they frequently find financial documents and other personal papers. I asked him if they shred them, he said no, they just toss them in the trash.

I've found university tuition bills, bank statements, etc. Not to mention photos and letters.

One of the strangest things I found was a love letter, written by one woman to another woman. The woman who wrote the two page letter used scrap paper, which happens to be her resume and list of references. Both include her full name, address, & telephone numbers.

Hopefully one of these days I'll find some books filled with $100.00 bills . Actually that's not a total joke, a lot of older people are from the generation that remembers the bank failures during the depression, or at least heard the stories.

Be sure to go through the items you plan to donate, be they yours or perhaps a relative who passed away. I stopped my F&MIL from throwing away a large stack of receipts with the credit card slips attached. Many of the older charge slips included the full credit card number. Also be careful about what you keep in storage. Some of items I found came from storage facilities that auctioned off the contents when the renters fell behind in their payments. Yes, like the TV show, but without the staged BS drama.

 

I found live ammunition in a desk at Goodwill once. I grabbed it and discreetly handed it to an employee so as not to worry anyone, but I can imagine someone freaking out if they saw it.

The next time I see a camera with film still in it I'm going to buy it, finish the roll, and get it developed to see what's on it. I've opened a few cameras with film still in them and regretted it every time. I think it would be a neat little project to try to figure out who the people in the pictures are and get the photos back to them. Worst case, I'll frame them and hang them near the mystery college class photo I got for $2 (someday when I'm dead and gone that photo is going to fuck with a future generation trying to figure out who the relative is) or the college diploma my brother got for $1

 

Thanks for mentioning cameras, MSD, I forgot about those. I find many with film still in them, even found a digcam with the memory card left in it.

This reminds me of the guy who bought the boxes of Ansel Adams negatives that had gone missing. I'd need to Google it for the details, but I do know the negatives were eventually returned to the Adams Trust under the terms (not disclosed) of the lawsuit settlement.

Experts: Ansel Adams photos found at garage sale worth $200 million - CNN.com

 

I did a paid internship with a large city government many years ago.

This particular city sent out quarterly bills to property owners who had overdue taxes. The number of tax delinquent properties was considerable and ever-growing, since they weren't doing any tax foreclosures. You could owe many years' worth of taxes and get nothing but the quarterly bill.

With each mailing, hundreds of thousands of those bills were returned as undeliverable by the Postal Service.

At my suggestion, we did a sample survey of the returned mail, counting out and looking at every 500th one, to try to get a handle on this phenomenon.

Of course, most of them were unremarkable. But there is a fair bit of randomness in mail handling. I found some strange things.

Personal letters. Photos. And thousands of dollars worth of checks (cheques) -- checks to the city, checks to local utilties, checks to churches and charities, checks to individuals, all swept up into the vast quantity of mail returned to the city treasurer.

And that was just in 1/500 of the envelopes!