Poland

Your banking information and credit card details may be in Nigeria

Classified Polnews

Warsaw, Poland August 16, 2006 - Banking information and credit card details are sold to in Nigeria for as little as 20 British Pounds Sterling per item. The information is being taken from hard disks of PC's that have been recycle or sold on the used computer market.

Nigerians are buying discarded computers and recovering data from unerased hard drives. Your data could have been recovered from someone else's computer, be it company or individual, or from a computer that you discarded.

The vast majority of people do not understand that erasing the finals from a PC does not remove the information from the hard disk. To permanently remove information from a hard disk one must use a special program to overwrite the files and make them not recoverable.

Companies and individuals sell or deposit at recycling points PC's that have not only their information on them and information provided by their customers. So if a company or person has had access to any information on new, it is possible that your information has been made available to people in Nigeria for sale to criminals.

You can protect yourself by First routinely cleaning your disk using a disk cleaning program. And prior to selling or discarding your PC, being sure to make a final effort to clean their disk.

Additionally you can protect yourself by not giving credit card information on the Internet to companies when you purchase a product. It is best if use a third-party payment process of such as PayPal or to check out that do not reveal your banking information to the seller.