CUMMING — A former used car dealership on Canton Highway in Cumming is under investigation after authorities found boxes of personal customer information tossed into an open dumpster earlier this month.
The business was North Atlanta Motors, according to Forsyth County Deputy Epifanio Rodriguez, and boxes full of loan applications containing names, addresses and social security numbers had been discarded. He said a complainant called the sheriff's office on December 10.
"It looks as if they were dumping their leftover files and information that they had," said Rodriguez. "There was no one there when we got there - it was a closed business."
He said investigators even confiscated a number of blank checks from the trash bin.
Rodriguez said for now the case is civil in nature, but criminal charges are possible, depending on the outcome of the investigation and whether there was any criminal intent.
"It's still an open investigation...but with the amount of information that was there, you would think at some point someone would have said 'this is just not right,'" said Rodriguez.
Rodriguez called cases such as this one "rare" for Forsyth County.
