Apparently, shredding personal documents to avoid having your identity stolen doesn’t always work -- at least not if the thieves are willing to put all the little pieces back together.

A couple in Santa Clarita was up to that challenge, L.A. County Sheriff’s detectives say, and now 49-year-old Grant Lind and 37-year-old Tammy Combe are behind bars on multiple charges related to identity theft.

According to wire reports, the couple was arrested late last year after deputies seized check-making equipment, counterfeit checks, stolen IDs and hundreds of bank account numbers in their Newhall home. Sherriff’s Deputy Sgt. Steven Rohrbach announced the charges against them on Tuesday.

Lind and Combe are accused of taking shredded documents from a trash bin at a self-storage facility at 27815 Smyth Drive in Valencia and using that information to acquire the routing and bank account numbers of various people and businesses. From there they produced counterfeit checks, authorities say.

The Sheriff’s Department was alerted after a local church noticed that fake checks had siphoned more than $1,000 off of its books.

Lind and Combe were charged on April 18 with felony identity theft, forgery, burglary, grand theft and more.