@zzAW This indeed DOES happen.

I once found an external USB encl0sure for sale at a local thrift store. Could feel the weight of the drive inside, but no idea of size or if it would work at all. A good aluminum enclosure, so I took the risk.

Good more, as it is a 500 GB drive, and works well.

Came with the old owner's data -- and I was surprised to find folders containing photographs of his credit cards, front and back. Woot!!

The cards had expired, but still - lots of other folders, documents. I formatted the drive for reuse.

Same thing happened with a laptop, a nice looking HP Pavillion, also found at a thrift store.

Diane's laptop, as I found out, and I have a tool that allowed an easy reset of her admin password, for accessing the system. Shocking again.

It was running Vista, which surprised me by how pretty it looked and how snappy it was. I still have the laptop, Diane's date is long gone. Windows 8 runs well on it, win 10 I tried but the video drivers didn't match well, and no acceleration, so Win8.1 it is.