They used Geek Squad to upgrade their hard drive, and Geek Squad said they would destroy the old one. Few weeks later some dude buys their hard drive in a flea market outside of town. Good 'ol Best Buy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcyemfJ5H3o&NR
There was an almost identical incident here in Vancouver this past summer, it was a news item for a couple of days.
pretty interesting. I'm surprised they actually swear to physically destroy the drives in the first place though. most people have no idea how magnetic storage works and aren't aware that when things are deleted they're still actually there-- if best buy wanted to be reselling them, they could just be telling people they do a random rewrite of all the data and there's no way it could be recovered. it still could be, but most people don't know that, nor would most people try to extract data in a situation like that unless they had some very specific reason to.
Wow, lucky the guy was nice all the way in Illinois and returned the hard drive to its right owner, faithfully. If I were the old couple, I think I'd try to take some legal action...it is a policy of theirs that they made with the couple the hard drive would be destroyed. Now selling it...now that's just wrong.