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Could you fall victim to "Copier Crimes"

Tucson, AZ (KOLD) - From detailed plans for a building near ground zero, 300 pages of individual medical records, drug prescriptions, blood test results to a cancer diagnosis.  Just a few of the thousands of private records found while investigating the threat of identity theft from copy machines.

"For the common user, it's probably unknown that there is a security risk," Trent Duran said.

That risk is to the companies who use digital copiers that have really good memories.

Trent Duran with A.B. Dick Products in Tucson says they lease their copiers, mainly, to small local businesses.

"There's medical firms, there's real estate companies, there's accounting firms."

Since those firms deal with confidential information, Duran says their company makes sure it doesn't end up in the wrong hands.

Duran explained, "We bring the equipment and then we will either dispose of the hard drive or put in a new hard drive and use it as a rental machine."

But he says that's not a common practice with all copier companies.

"A lot of times that equipment goes straight back to the leasing company who just wholesales them out to wholesalers that buy used equipment by the mass loads. So your information could go anywhere basically," Duran told KOLD News 13.

Here is a good example. Duran says they just got this copier off a truck from Milwaukee. He has no idea what business used it or what we might find on the hard drive.

We took the drives to Computer Renaissance to see what they're recovery experts could pull off of them.

Computer expert, Tim Cannon said, "It doesn't matter if it's been deleted, formatted or whatever, I can still get data off of a drive if it hasn't been wiped."

While Cannon checks those drives for old documents, we're checking in with other investigations across the country that uncovered shocking results.

"This machine came from the city of Buffalo, New York, Police sex crimes division," John Juntunen said.

Juntunen with Digital Copier Security, went to a copier warehouse to see what he could find.

Not knowing what he might find, Juntunen bought four machines based on price and the number of pages printed.

Once the copiers were unloaded, he pulled the hard drives and using a forensic software program, available free on the internet, and ran a scan. He was able to download tens of thousands of documents.

One machine spit out 95 pages of pay stubs, names, addresses, social security numbers and $40,000 in copied checks.

The copier from the Buffalo Police Department had a list of wanted sex offenders and a rundown of targets in a major drug raid.

"Private data's private data. You don't want to have it exposed to anyone," Tim Cannon said.

"On these drives, I didn't find anything at all. It was completely blank," Cannon said of the drives given to us from A.B. Dick Products in Tucson.

Cannon says that's good news because it means the company previously using this copier possibly took extra security steps or had the drives wiped clean.

Steps, Cannon says, you should make sure your company is also taking.

"For your own protection, for your customer's protection, for your company's protection, you need to know exactly what's happening with that data and if it's possible for someone else to access it, you want to know that."