Men Caught Stealing Computers From Recycling Center May Have Been Data Mining, Cops Say

Two men arrested for stealing electronics from the Wyckoff Recycling Center may have been looking to recover sensitive personal information from the hard drives of computers, police said.  

Sgt. Jack McEwan spied two men removing computers from the locked recycling center on West Main Street on the Sunday afternoon, authorities said.

Robert B. Vindeed, 22, and Thomas J. Risseeuw, 21, both of Wyckoff, were arrested and charged with burglary and theft and sent to the Bergen County Jail in default of $5,000 bail. 

Wyckoff Police Chief Benjamin Fox said the two men offered no explanation for the computer thefts, but said his department is aware that old computers are often sold and mined for personal data such as credit card info, passwords and social security numbers.

"Residents recycling an old computer should remove the hard drive first, destroy it, and dispose of it in the trash," Fox said. "The remaining computer parts should be recycled."

Everything from cellphones to the hard drives of personal computers can be easily liberated of whatever valuable personal information had been stored on them.

Older Windows XP laptops, netbooks and Android mobile phones are especially susceptible to data mining, according to a recent story in USA Today.

Apple iPads and iPhones, and Blackberry devices don't pose the same risk, but care should be taken to reset devices to factory setting before selling or disposing of the electronics, identity theft expert Robert Siciliano told USA Today.

Siciliano purchased 30 used devices off Craigslist and discovered that data on half of them had been properly erased while the other 15 contained data ranging from bank account numbers to court records. 

Asked how he would deal with private data on hard drives ready for disposal, Siciliano told USA Today, "I would beat the thing to death."