I recently received a change of address notice in my mail. Not for me, for someone totally unknown to me, who apparently submitted a CoA with my home as their new address.
I assumed it was merely a mistake, the wrong house number, or zipcode, whatever. I’ve notified the post office of the error, will turn in the mail we’ve gotten so far, and that should be taken care of. It then occurred to me, what if this was the first step in some sort of scam?
I have no idea what sort of scam it could be, but rather than wait for it to bite me in the ass, I figured let the Teeming Millions noodle on it.
Never heard of it. But using my imagination, if it’s not an error, a third person changed a second person’s address to yours (the first person) and they are now going to raid your mailbox for the second’s person valuable mail (SS checks? Who knows). But if that were the case then I don’t know why they wouldn’t just raid the second person’s box to start with, unless they are in an apartment with a locking mailbox or something.
That’s not a bad one. Though, if that’s the goal, the thief has chosen a spectacularly bad address to pull it on, my wife and I are home all day every day, and usually hear the mailman put the mail in our box, and get it immediately.
BTW, the woman’s old address is about 150 miles away from mine.
Wrong street name, number, town, whatever. Somebody made a mistake. Nobody else wants their mail to go to your house. You confirm that the mailbox is not easily scammed. These mail scams do occur in areas where there are unattended homes, abandoned homes and so forth. So the USPS has this system set up to send notifications to both the old and new addresses to reveal the scam. You handled it right and it will be resolved.
PS. Now that address changes can be done online, anything can happen as far as clerical mistake and miss-identification.
The real concern would be if you got the notification that YOUR address was changing. I’d jump on that with a personal visit. It could still be clerical error.
Identity theft, change of address would prevent the target from seeing bills, bank/credit card statements, new cell phone bills/welcoming letters.
The new cell phone bill is how I found my Identity was stolen and used to buy and activate a cell phone buy jewlery and electronics, even applied for credit to buy and install a hot tub.
This all in the late 90’s early 00"s.
(Filled out fraud forms in person at the hot tub place, they couldn’t figure out what that angle was about either>)
I’ve recently been getting letters to do with car insurance addressed to an unknown person at my address. I’ve returned them to sender, but they looked like policy documents etc rather than just junk mail (I didn’t open the envelopes).
I did wonder whether it could be some sort of identity theft in progress, but thought it was probably just someone who can’t type. Presumably that person’s car insurance is invalid if the address is wrong, though…
It may be someone playing a prank or getting revenge on someone. Change the person’s mailing address and suddenly they’re not getting any of their mail.
