Someone using my address!!

[dangly131]

In the past month i have received 5 pieces of post addressed to someone but that person does not live at this address. They are all post from different places though I am not sure who as I have not opened any. I know that this is not from a previous occupant as I have lived at this address for 25 years and still remember the previous owners names who were known to have lived at this address again for many years before me.
Who do I contact about this? Can I open the mail to find out who to contact? I am concerned that someone is using my address and it will affect me as a result.

You should get this sorted as if they are using your address, your credit reports will be linked to this person, and I cannot see any "good" reason for having letters sent to a stranger's house.

Have you kept the letters? If so, are there any addresses or company names on them that you could contact without having to open them? If it's just an address, try googling it to get a company name.

I'm assuming that there isn't an address similar to yours locally, our house name is the same as another house in a village 10 miles away and we frequently get their post - but it is clearly their address on it.

What about phoning the non emergency police line to get their advice?

I'd just mark them all "not known at this address and put them in the postbox". Royal Mail will return to the senders, who will then know to look into it further.

Sorry - "not known at this address" and put them in the postbox - you don't need to write "put them in the postbox"!

Thank you for this advice. I googled the PO Box and found a few suggestions to the companies. I rang one and they said they saw I had returned 3 letters already to them. I explained the situation and they were grateful for me telling them this. Hopefully it should stop now - they did say there will not be any more post to this address.

It's fine to open the letters if it's to find out who sent them, call them and get to the bottom of it all.

It's only illegal to open someone else's mail if you do not have a reasonable excuse for doing so or if you "intend to act to another's detriment" like stealing their details to access their bank accounts. You're fine under the circumstances.

Credit files are not linked to addresses. It will not affect your credit file unless the person also steals your identity - using your address is an inconvenience, but black-listed addresses are an urban myth.

I'd return everything to sender. We get this quite a bit, with car insurance docs etc, but I return 98% of it the next day and hopefully they'll quit it!

I would check with the companies that no one has set up an account at your address, to avoid fraud

There was a thread on this a while back, sorry but I can't remember the details. But the people getting the post delivered to the poster's address were trying to carry out some kind of identity fraud.

Credit files are not linked to addresses. It will not affect your credit file unless the person also steals your identity - using your address is an inconvenience, but black-listed addresses are an urban myth.

Sorry but I disagree with this. Our home address got linked to a person who worked for us, his employment didn't involve our home address at all. It only got flagged to us when we applied for something and the credit scoring showed a link to this person (he had a terrible history).

It took us ages to get the company to remove the link and clear up our record.