What do the police actually mean?

[Hardgrafter]

You may have not read this story of fraudsters trying to auction a £500k house (and others previously)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-ma ... r-38080102

What puzzled me is what actual measures do the police mean by

"Det Sgt Phil Larratt, of Greater Manchester Police, said: "As this case demonstrates, fraudsters can use your identity details to open new bank accounts, request new driving licences and even try and steal your own home.
"We urge the public to secure their mail boxes and employ measures to protect their identities."

How do you secure your mail box? My mail just falls onto the hall floor. Putting a basket under the mail flap doesnt protect it. Or perhaps the owner had a separate mail box outside the property.

As the owner says, its surely the responsibility of the DVLA and Land Registry to tighten up procedures.

[stevensfo]

Det Sgt Phil Larratt, of Greater Manchester Police, said: "As this case demonstrates, fraudsters can use your identity details to open new bank accounts, request new driving licences and even try and steal your own home. We urge the public to secure their mail boxes and employ measures to protect their identities."

Note 'try'.

Saeed Ghani and Atif Mahmood both admitted conspiracy to defraud.

It sounds very wishy washy advice. If you read the article, they were auctioning the house, yes, but the owner was never in any real danger of losing it. Saeed and Atif may have got some cash from prospective buyers.

Quite how they could open a bank account or get a driving licence is a mystery.

Steve

[Infrasonic]

Quite how they could open a bank account or get a driving licence is a mystery.

Steve

https://www.gov.uk/id-for-driving-licence

Getting forged or cloned documents to obtain driving licences and passports, and consequently open bank accounts isn't that difficult if you are a fraudster for a living. Passports on the black market used to be about £600-1K.

One thing that would really clamp down on this is to make people attend in person and have their photograph taken every time an application is made for new or replacement documents/benefits et al. With modern day automated machine learning in place multiple applications would be much easier to spot.

The national ID card with biometrics got scrapped, maybe it should be looked at again...

[midnightcatprowl]

On the securing of physical rather than online mailboxes I've recently being doing a lot of leaflet delivering in my locality for a particular cause which I support. It is an area where many big old houses have been divided up into flats plus there are some new builds intended from the start as flats.

It has astonished me how many landlords provide their tenants with completely inadequate facilities for receiving mail. In the divided up old houses often the letter box in the main door to the building has been sealed up and in the porch or - worse - at the side of the building out of view of the street there are very small individual metal mailboxes attached to the wall with a flat number on each. Most of them are too small to accommodate a reasonable amount of mail and not just in capacity but in dimension, many would not, for example, take an A4 size envelope (and officialdom + many organisations like some banks and card companies do still send out A4 size envelopes) unless folded over and that in itself which pretty much fill the box.

Usually there is a flap at the top through which items are posted and the tenant retrieves their mail by unlocking the door of the box underneath. Some of these boxes are strongly made with decent locks but many are made of such thin metal with such inadequate locks that I reckon I could easily break into them myself armed with nothing more than a table knife.

There must be great risks for people forced to receive their mail in this way and having no choice in the matter.