Yeah, sure, just send the phone anywhere. Who cares where they say they live?
A letter arrived at our house the other day. “Who’s this name?” we asked each other. It was from Orange, the mobile phone company. Being suspicious types, we opened it - and found a letter from Orange pleading with this person, who had never lived here, not to give up their Orange subscription, and think of all the good that could come from staying with the company.
Only two scenarios lead to letters like this: Orange having screwed up its subscriber database, or someone fraudulently using our address to get a phone and abscond with it, leaving Orange to send annoyed letters and perhaps, eventually, bailiffs to try to find their missing phone (and person).
It turned out, as you’d expect, to be the second one: fraud. They took out the contract on January 3rd (the second working day of the year - even crooks take time off, I guess) and cancelled it at the end of February. But of course they still have the phone.
The perplexing thing though is: what details did this person give? Credit card details? Did they match the address? I guess they got it delivered to their “work” address, though that will no doubt turn out to be a block of flats where they can get in the front door and then pretend to be “at home” when the postie arrives.
Questions: does this affect our credit record? If someone goes on the lam allegedly on your address, does Orange put a black mark against the address? If it knows it’s fraud, should it have the responsibility of making sure that our credit record isn’t affected?
And how are its systems so weak that someone presumably - because there’s been no suspicious activity against our credit cards - using faked details, such as a credit card address that doesn’t match the “accommodation” address and a delivery address that’s also different can get past Orange’s fraud systems? I wonder if they said they’re a student, and ours is their home, but they’re working (or at uni) in some other city, so their credit card stuff goes to the other address. Quite a tough one for the anti-fraud systems to check against.
Obviously, though, we have hired the boys - with Tony Sirico on the right - to go and tell this person how much we, uh, don’t like this. He did real jail time in Sing Sing, ya know.
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Why targets make service companies deliver worse services (6 September 2004; score: 37.14%)
- Which mobile operator should I go - or should I stay - with? (29 July 2007; score: 35.89%)
- Well, that about wraps it up for the Portable Media Center (or Centre) (12 July 2004; score: 35.06%)
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March 6th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
> does this affect our credit record?
I believe the credit record companies (Experian and chums) will let you put a note against items like this, if they do make it to your credit record.
But yeah, I think it should be the responsibility of Orange. They need to check they’re signing up real people with real addresses.
March 6th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
I had the same thing happen to me, with T-Mobile. Like you, I can’t understand how somebody convinced
the mobile company to deliver the phone to a location different to the given address. I’m convinced the fraud
stemmed from the T-Mobile shop I had bought another phone at a few weeks before - but neither T-Mobile or
the police seemed to be interested and I’ve never heard anything about it again.
March 6th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
We’ve not quite had that, but we have had letters from HMRC demanding repayments on tax credits, court summonses for fare evasion on the railways and sundry other annoyances from debt collectors - all to people who don’t live here.
The really shocking bit is where the documentation for fare evasion says the address was checked and verified. How did they do that then?
Touch wood, none of it has turned into anything serious yet.
March 7th, 2008 at 8:54 am
I just moved house and had a ream of those letters coming in. Had to call the bailiffs at one point, and they told me just to mark the letters as ‘return to sender’. Clears your address, your name etc, when they eventually sort it, I think. Was even inspired to buy a ‘return to sender’ stamp and its greatly reduced the junk mail we get…!
March 8th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Bizarrely I recently had the opposite problem with address security when signing up with 3.
I live in a building which has been subdivided into about 18 flats, but automated postcode finder only has it listed as just one building. My bank has the flat number on my official address and this has never caused me a problem in 12 months of living there.
However, i couldn’t pass the 3 credit check as they can’t manually overide their postcode field to add in additional data such as flat numbers or house names.
In the end I had to change my address with my bank, which they agreed was madness.