Hundreds of personal documents found in dumpster

TULSA - A Tulsa business finds hundreds of documents in its dumpster.

Those files contained copies of social security numbers, addresses, phone numbers; there were even blank checks inside.

The owners of On the Spot Custom Jewelry Design are in the process of building a new shop on the corner of 51st and South Yale.

Old walls have been knocked down and new ones put up.

But one night this week Eugen Probst made a strange discovery out back.

"When we were dumping the remains of the dry wall into the dumpster we found all of these files," Probst said.

Hundreds of files were found.

The documents contained all sorts of personal information, dating as far back as 2004 and as early as 2009.

Probst managed to save 96 of them before sanitation workers came by and emptied the dumpster.

"Blank checks, social security cards, id's, bank statements, telephone statements, everything. I mean it's, it's quite extensive," Probst said.

The documents were traced back to a business a couple of doors down from probst called American Check Cashers of Oklahoma, LLC.

Christi Hardee is the new owner of the business.

On Friday night, she issued this statement to 2NEWS, "There was a change in ownership of this business and so as new owners, we decided to do some house cleaning and made two stacks of files. Confidential files to be shredded and non-confidential files to be dumped. On Wednesday, November 24th, we hired a document shredding company to shred the confidential pile while the non-confidential pile was to be dumped. Apparently, confidential files got mixed up with non-confidential files and I'm not sure if this was our fault or the document shredding company but our staff was clearly aware of those items that we instructed to be shredded versus those to be dumped. We value our customers' privacy and confidential information and thought that we had taken all precautions necessary. I can assure you that any future shredding will be supervised by myself - personally."

Probst says he'll try to contact all the people he has information for.

If he can't get ahold of them, he says he'll destroy the files himself.