Somebody using my postal address - what can I do?

[Kabsy]

I have just received an insurance quote in the post addressed to a man that doesn't live at our address and has never done so as we bought the house brand new.

I have phoned the company it is from they said it has been done on line, there is no phone number quoted and slightly oddly the birth date is same day, same year but wrong month as mine.
It is a quote for a motorbike quote and I have checked and it is none of my neighbours by mistake.

Should I be worried? What are the risks and what can I do? If anything.

TIA

Can you ask the post office if there are any mail redirections in place for your address as you suspect that someone may be using your address for fraudulant purposes? I'm not sure whether they will give out this info though. Otherwise I think that all you can do is send any mail back to the sender with "not known at this address" on it.

Confirmation of any mail redirections would have been posted to your address though.

Could be a mistake - maybe he filled in his postcode incorrectly with his house number and the "fill in your address" option picked up your address.

I wouldn't worry unduly - all it needs is for someone to make a slip in the postcode and the wrong address gets filled in automatically - happened to me at Specsavers.

Well done for ringing company though - I'd have just sent it straight back with 'Not known at this address' on.

We had an insurance payout sent to our house for someone we'd never heard of (and who definitely hadn't lived there in the previous 3 years). Cheque for >£2000 . I did ring them about that!

is the whole estate new? or are there houses down the road that could have been re-numbered?

When we moved into our brand new house in Cardiff it transpired that the houses up the street had been re-numbered in order to accommodate the new houses, so the numbers 1-16 or so had been re-numbered to numbers 50/66 or something along those lines - anyway it was very confusing but the upshot was that when we moved into our brand new, only just been built house which was number 8, we kept getting letters to the previous occupants of number 8 which was now number 62 - are you still with me? :O. It was very confusing, and the scary bit was that the guy at the re-numbered number 8 had signifficcant debts and we even had a bayliff round to discuss them, a very agressive man he was and came round one night while dh was out and I was home on my own. Took a lot of ringing around etc to stop people coming round demanding money we didn't owe them.

only amusing bit was that the bloke's name was trebilcock, apologies to anyone whose name this is but we did constantly refer to him as a trebil cock. lol.

Thanks everyone,

Hhmm... maybe I panicked a bit, but thankfully you have all made it seem less worrying. I did actually phone the company back (see how panicky I am) and I got another woman who said it happens all the time, usually kids on the net or someone who wants a rough idea but doesn't necessarily want the aftermath postal/phone junk! Hadn't thought of that one.

Might be worth contacting the credit reference agencies, Equifax and Experian, just to be on the safe side. They are both online but get their address off the site and write to them asking for a copy of your file - if you get it by post it's only a fiver.

those sites edam mentioned, if you google them and the word free you can get a 30 day trial and your credit report online to print out. It will show any names associated with your address, and any details of credit applied for etc