Bank account details belonging to thousands of Britons are being sold in West Africa for less than £20 each, the BBC's Real Story programme has found.

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That is scary.

To format an HDD is purely not good enough.

The article actually says "deleting all your files" isn't good enough.

Formatting is an acceptable solution - it takes a literal computer genius to recover files from a format, and even then - usually you can only see a file name, not contents of the file.

There is some good recovery programs out there swiss as you prolly know, I know they can't get all data back or so I am led to believe.

I have formatted a few HDD's in my time and managed to recover several files, obviously not all.

I prefer to wipe files with certain shredders as this is more secure than just a format.

I was told by a good friend of mine that even if you smash your HDD, parts of the platters can still be read by the powers that be if needed?????