A Northwest Glendale resident suspected an attempt at identify theft or burglary casing after seeing two men and a car in a private driveway. Incident reported below —
I stepped outside to confront two males, one elderly male (early 60’s) in the passenger seat and another male (obviously the driver) in his late teens or early 20’s who was standing by my car and near my trash cans. I asked them if I could be of assistance and they got a bit flustered at this juncture so perhaps they did not expect to see someone or thought no one was home. They point blank asked me if my recycling bin was “my recycling bin.” ????? I told them to my knowledge it is the same recycling bin I have had since the day I moved in. They then proceeded to tell me what sounded like a nonsensical story about being on my property to check the recycling bin specifically…I again reiterated that to my knowledge I had neither lost or misplaced a recycling bin and as far as I knew, the city did not MARK trash bins with addresses of where they deliver them too, but simply bring us all the same generic one so unless an owner “labeled” their trash bin, which I didn’t, I assumed I still had what was considered mine. I asked them what the address was on the recycling bin on their property that the deemed not “theirs” … they either got embarrassed (if this is a benign incident), or fearful that I was catching on that the story they were trying to tell me was not adding up or making sense to me and I was getting alarmed. At this juncture, the young gentleman, who had been near my car and the trash cans, dashed for the drivers seat of a SILVER, new looking MERCEDES Benz (this is another strange component to this story) and sped away so quickly that my attempt to garner a driver’s license for good measure was impossible.
the writer’s conclusion:
…someone may be going around looking for information that people would put in recycling bins that could help in perpetrating identity fraud/theft and perhaps driving around in a vehicle that would give appearances to the contrary ([a] Silver Mercedes Benz), is part of the cover. Or perhaps there is something more sinister (like burglary or casing out houses) than mere recycling bin checking/dumpster diving going on and that is just the story they give when confronted unexpectedly.