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Woolworths exposes customers to ID theft with receipts

ID theft concerns have been raised following revelations that collapsed retail giant Woolworths has dumped its customers' receipts in a skip.

A wad of receipts containing signatures, bank account numbers and expiry dates are reported to have been discovered and passed to authorities following the closure of Woolworth's Loughton branch in Essex.

The papers are said to have been thrown out with the rest of the rubbish from the store as it wound up its operations and no security measures such as shredding were taken.

According to Dave Whitelegg, a leading ID security expert, the "error of judgement could have caused a catastrophe if the receipts fell into the wrong hands", the Daily Mail reports.

He went on to say that ID theft was "a growing menace, and everyone in the UK is at risk unless their personal and confidential information is destroyed".

Which? Computing recently warned that council tips and internet auction sites were being raided by cyber crooks out to recover deleted data from dumped computers using specialist software.

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