A woman has shared a simple trick which she claims helps “avoid identity theft” – using hand sanitiser to turn ink invisible before throwing away mail with personal details on it.
Milca uses sanitiser to scrub her personal details from labels and letters due to concerns that fraudsters could use her information and even adopt her identity.
The 28-year-old discovered that simply wiping the ink with hand sanitiser renders it ‘invisible’ – and has gone viral sharing a clip of herself doing so on Instagram, garnering 15 million views.
Milca captioned the video: “Life hack: how to avoid getting your identity stolen.”
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In the clip, she can be seen applying sanitiser before scrubbing a parcel label to remove the personal information.
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She wrote: “WARNING!! WEAR GLOVES WHEN DOING THIS.
“No matter how unimportant, my mom wouldn’t let us throw away any letter or package that had our name and address on it.
“We’d keep them in a bag, and have a bonfire in our backyard to burn all the unimportant docs with our personal information on them.
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“She read somewhere that people were digging through garbage to find mails with people’s personal info, and do crazy things with it.
“So now I have an irrational fear of throwing away anything that has personal information visible.
“But living in an apartment, I can’t light up a bonfire on a balcony. So I use hand sanitizer to erase personal information from packages and envelopes.
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“Did you know hand sanitizers could do this?”
Now, the trick is a regular practice for the content creator, who first stumbled upon it during lockdown when she was regularly using sanitiser..
“That routine was to always put on hand sanitiser the moment I step into my home,” Milca, a digital marketing strategist from Canada, told What’s The Jam.
“One day, I immediately grabbed my package without letting the sanitiser dry off.
“That’s when I noticed the ink on my thumb and a matching print on the label where the ink was removed.
“I grabbed some more hand sanitiser and rubbed off all my personal information, leaving the label blank.
“I do it all the time now, but I make sure I wear gloves when doing it.
“I would definitely recommend this hack to others.”
The clip received over 270,000 likes, and viewers were quick to test it out.
One user said: “My boyfriend covers it with sharpie and then cuts it all up this is guna save him SO MUCH TIME THANK YOU.”
Another user said: “YOO!! That works?! Thank you cause I usually just scratch it out with market.”
Another user said: “Holy S**t!!!!!! It works thank you for posting.”
One person commented: “Appreciate you G.”
Someone else added: “People who do not get the point are certainly not from the Netherlands. Thank you for the tip. This is very important for those of us who do not have a shredder at home (yet).”
But other uses pointed out that it was potentially fruitless.
One person commented: “This is stupid. And a waste of time. Just get a shredder!”
Another user said: “I know ppl that steal identities, they said they left going thru yo trash back in 2008.”
Another user said: “But you post your life online and sign up for stuff? Your data already out there. Ain’t no digging threw the trash.”
Another user said: “This is pointless everyone already knows your name and address that’s how it got there.”
