Personal Insurance Info Trashed in Dumpster

Farmer's Insurance is looking to get in touch with a former employee who left thousands of insurance manuals and documents, some of them sensitive, in a dumpster outside his business.

  Greg Wolfe was an insurance agent for Farmer's out of Benton County for about four years. When he was terminated in August he left behind a large paper trail.

  "Apparently when he cleaned out his office a few weeks ago he threw a bunch of stuff in the trash that he shouldn't have thrown in the trash," says Travis Kershner, District Manager for Farmer's Insurance.

  Farmer's Insurance was able to get all the trashed information back in their custody. A great deal of it was pretty insignificant -- insurance manuals, training documents, even coloring books. But there were six customer files that were discovered Labor Day weekend, amongst all of this, inside a Bentonville dumpster, that could have posed a threat had they gotten into the wrong hands. These files contained social security numbers, drivers license numbers, phone numbers, addresses and more.

Kershner says he is confident that the files, that were recovered by a Bentonville business man, had not been tampered with. He says files are normally never discarded this way. In fact, Farmer's Insurance uses a computer system that eliminates paper work, and has a company professionally destroy any remaining documents they don't need.
  Though potentially damaging, Kershner doesn't think Greg Wolfe's actions were malicious.

  "I would classify it as irresponsible... not willful," Kershner says.

  The six customers affected by this incident will get a call from Farmer's on Thursday. Farmer's has been unable to reach Greg Wolfe about this incident, as were we.