ID fraud Q

Recently I’ve received correspondence (1) from a bank relating to a new account (2) from HMRC for 2 separate people with names nothing like mine – both just returned to sender.

Yesterday I received 2 sim cards for a person with my surname and a first name starting with the same letter. If I CBA I was going to phone the phone co’s, not sure what they’ll tell me though.

Should I be concerned?

Possibly. Scam with ‘delivered to wrong person and fake courier picks it up’?

There are potential credit rating risks though even just for the same address.

Yes

OK so what should I do?

For the accounts and HMRC, probably nothing for now though I might be inclined to call the bank anyway.

For the SIMs, I’d phone the mobile company to tell them. Getting close enough to your name to suggest that they’re trying to use your details.

Report to the companies (fraud department) providing the accounts and sim cards would seem the obvious first step. They ought to be interested – IME banks certainly are.

You could try contacting HMRC, but it’s as likely as not to be their mistake – I once got a load of confidential data for other people from them!

The HMRC aspect might be unconnected, but the sim cards sound more of a concern – are they prepay or pay monthly?

Either way if you want to stop anything further happening the best thing to do is register with CIFAS and they will put a flag on which will be seen by more lenders when they pull data from the CRAs when processing applications – making them manually review the application and ask for further confirmations. Alternatively you can go to each CRA – Experian is the best – and register but this may not stop it as effectively.

http://www.cifas.org.uk/identity_fraud