The year was 2003. A man sat in a car staring at a large, anonymous warehouse in near Seattle. He sat in his car, staring, noting what was going on in the neighborhood, who was going into the warehouse, and who was leaving. Nothing escaped his notice as he sat there, watching and waiting, for an hour.
Was he a mugger waiting for a victim? A cop on surveillance? A hit man waiting for a target? An FBI agent looking to tail a criminal?
No, it was a journalist and this isn’t the start of some novel—it’s what really happened when Brad Stone broke the story on Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company. Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 but was extremely secretive and tight-lipped about his new venture. Very few people knew about it, and almost no detail was made public. Even now, few people know what went on at Blue Origin in its first years.
The big break happened in 2003 when Brad Stone wrote Bezos in Space for Newsweek magazine; before his article, no one knew that Bezos was connected to Blue Origin or what Blue Origin was.
Why am I talking about Blue Origin and what does this have to do with expat life?
Because the way Brad Stone figured out about Blue Origin demonstrates the need for a critical piece of equipment that expats need to keep themselves safe. See, Brad Stone had heard rumors of a space company in Seattle called “Blue” and he had sleuthed down the company’s registration and legal address, but that was it. He traveled to the warehouse but had nothing. Here’s how he describes what happened next:
I couldn’t see anything through the covered windows, and there was no one outside. I sat in the rental car, just wondering, indulging visions of secret, spaceships, and billionaire-funded mission to Mars. But I had nothing to go on, and it was intensely frustrating. After an hour, I couldn’t take it anymore. I got out, walked across the street to a trashcan, removed an armful of its contents, walked back to the car, and dumped it in the trunk.
A few weeks later, for Newsweek magazine, I wrote the first story about Blue Origin, entitled “Bezos in Space.” Aided by an extremely convenient discovery I’d made that night—a sheaf of coffee-stained drafts of a Blue Origin mission statement—I reported that the long-term mission of the firm was to create an enduring human presence in space.
The Everything Store by Brad Stone, page 156.
If the employees at Blue Origin had disposed of their trash better, who knows when we would have learned about Blue Origin?
Now, I bet none of you expats are billionaires trying to start a secret space company, so we probably don’t have journalists going through our trash..1 But it’s quite possible that we have unscrupulous people who see us as a target and want to steal our identity or even just curious neighbors who want to learn more about the strange foreigners!
That’s why every expat should have a quality shredder.
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Why you need a shredder
Ok, so most articles on The Prepared Expat feel a bit more exciting than this one. Whether it’s new models for assessing risk or creative ways to get Two Factor Authentication codes to work around the world or dozens of ways to conceal cash as you travel, the idea of buying a shredder seems…a bit boring.
Sometimes it’s the boring things in life that keep you most safe. Locking doors. Putting on seatbelts. Having a good password on your phone. Storing the 32-bit encryption key for your self-hosted crypto wallet in a safe deposit box in Zurich. You know, little things like that. It may not be cool, but a shredder is critical.
Here’s why. As an expat, you’re regularly producing paperwork and documents that can be used to steal your identity. Think visa applications, passport applications, legal documents, health insurance claims, bank account information, tax forms. As an expat, you’re producing more documents than an average person not only because you have more legal requirements (e.g. a visa) but also because most countries are “old school” and require copious amounts of hard copies for any application or interaction with the government. Personal information leaks out of us like a sieve.
And that personal information can be used by criminals to pretend to be you and commit a whole host of crimes in your name. Here are just some of the ways that personal information can be used:
- Get a loan or open a credit card in your name, spend money like [insert name of your hated politician here], and leave you with the bill.
- Commit tax fraud. By filing taxes on your behalf, criminals can get government benefits sent to them instead of you…and make you look like the criminal in the process.
- Steal your money. This is a tad harder to do, but with the right information, a criminal can impersonate you to transfer your money out of your account into the netherworld.
- Apply for government services. Thieves can claim to be you, say they’re unemployed, and get unemployment money or even social security payments in your name.
You might even need to return to your passport country to restore your identity.
Now, in all of those situations, you’re off the hook legally and financially if you can prove your identity was stolen. But it is a MASSIVE headache to have to prove fraud leading to hundreds of lost hours restoring your identity. And imagine doing that across time zones if you’re already overseas. In fact, it’s such a monumental task to restore your identity that you may even have to fly back to your passport country to restore it.
Why it’s worse for expats
Now, not to frighten you, but the above list of what a thief can do with your personal information is a list of crimes they can commit in my passport country. What could they do with my information in your or my host country? I wouldn’t be surprised if they could do something that would get me blacklisted or deported, though I don’t know. Do you?
Further, if someone stole my identity in the US, I would know about it—I have alerts on my credit files and I pay for identity theft insurance (more on that a different day!) and so I would see if someone opened a loan in my name. Would you know if someone opened up a credit card in your name in your host country? Do you even know how to get alerts if that were the case?
In the US and most of the West, if a crime is committed in your name—e.g. a personal loan taken out—and you can prove fraud, you’re not liable for the amount of the loan. Is it the same in your host country or are you just liable for the full amount? And even if you’re not liable, do you know how to contest the charge and prove fraud?
It’s better if you never have to find out the answer to those questions.
Preventing identity theft is always better than recovering your identity after the fact. Especially as an expat.
It’s better to prevent identity theft than to fix it. Especially as an expat.
What you should shred
The rule of thumb is to shred anything with your personal information on it. So that means visa applications, passport applications, tax records, bank statements, health records, prescription labels, shipping addresses, credit cards, driver’s licenses, ATM cards, checks, resumes, receipts—even junk mail that has your personal information on it. If you run a business, then you need to shred all of the above for your business, plus any customer information, business license, tax records, or trade secrets.
And most people don’t think of a photo as containing your “personal information”, but you should shred these as well so that criminals can’t use your image for nefarious purposes. This is especially the case if you have passport or visa-style photos that you need to dispose of.
What shredder to get
If you search for shredders, you’ll find that they generally come in three types: strip-cut, cross-cut, or micro-cut. A strip-cut shredder reduces a piece of paper to around 40 strips that go the length of the page. A cross-cut chops a page into around 400 pieces by cutting the strips into smaller pieces. A micro-cut reduces a page to around 2000 particles, essentially pulverizing a page.
Here’s what the results of those shredders look like:
Reconstructing a strip-cut document would be tedious, but is definitely doable and so I’d encourage you to avoid that style of shredder unless you have no alternative. Cross-cut may be possible to reconstruct, but it would be a magnitude of difficulty harder. Micro-cut, though, is practically impossible to put back together, probably even for an intelligence agency with a massive budget. The particles are just too small. If you want to protect your personal information and identity, then, micro-cut is the way to go.
If you can’t use a micro-cut
Unfortunately, you may not be able to use a micro-cut shredder anywhere in the world. They’re a newer technology and so your host country may only have a strip-cut or cross-cut. Or perhaps you’re traveling with a portable shredder, which appear to only have strip-cut options.
It’s not hard to turn a strip-cut document into a cross-cut document; just grab a bunch of strips and cut them a few times to get them into smaller pieces. That would be frustrating and annoying if it’s a large amount of items, but if there’s a few documents that really need to be kept secure, it’s an option for you.
Alternatively, if you’re traveling, your hotel may have a shredder that you can access. I’d encourage you to politely request that you watch the document being shredded or do it yourself; you don’t want to hand over to hotel staff a document worthy of shredding and hope that they do it.
Going two steps further
By shredding your documents with personal information, you’ve taken a massive step forward to protecting yourself from criminals, but there are two other things you should consider.
If you don’t shred documents, a criminal probably won’t go through your garbage every day for an entire month. If you do shred, though, you’ll likely have shredded documents from a month (or more!) concentrated all in one place for a criminal to snatch. If you’re using a strip-cut shredder, that might actually be worse for your security. Even if you’re using a cross-cut or micro-cut shredder, this danger of “concentration” remains, but there are a couple of easy solutions for it.
1. Shred everything
If all you shred are documents with your personal information, the odds are that a criminal could piece together enough different scraps to gain your personal information. If, however, you shred every single piece of paper that you throw away, you dilute the concentration of personal information among the shredded documents, making it nearly impossible for a criminal to find valuable information amidst all the junk.
Put that junk mail to good use and send it through the shredder.
2. Break the bag
Instead of throwing away a bag of all your shredded documents and thereby signaling “steal me!” to any would-be criminal, dump the contents of the shredder loose into the garbage can/dumpster. Dumping out the bag will mix up the shreds so that one document is widely dispersed, making it unlikely that a criminal would get all of one document and will discourage a criminal from trying if the shreds are mixed in with rotting fish, dirty diapers, and smelly tomatoes.
Conclusion
Shredding your documents is one of the simplest yet most effective ways to protect your identity as an expat, and it’s a step that shouldn’t be overlooked. Whether it’s visa paperwork, bank statements, or health records, shredding ensures that your sensitive information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. While it’s a critical first step, remember that true security also requires vigilance in other areas—like staying safe online, monitoring your credit, and using credit freezes when necessary. Taken together, these actions will help ensure you’re well-protected both on paper and in the digital world.
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Footnotes
- If you are, and you’re reading this blog, I’ll sell it to you in exchange for a seat on your spaceplane.
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