PSA: Be Careful Buying Gun Safes

I went to a popular home improvement store today which carried a large selection of gun safes. While picking out the appropriate unit for a client, I noticed many of them possessed “Sold” tickets. This warned customers that the floor model had already been sold to another customer and could not be purchased. When I looked closely at the tickets, I realized that the name, cell phone, and home address of the customer was either written directly on the ticket or included within an attached receipt.

The following displays one of the safes with a full layaway receipt including the (redacted) customer name and cell phone.

The following shows another safe which displayed the customer’s name and home address.

If I were a burglar, I would know of a good home to target in a few weeks. Even worse, one of the safes had the combination visible within the documentation on top of the unit. The lesson here is to always  purchase security-related items with cash and never provide your name or address to the store. They might recklessly share your information with the public and make you a target.