WEEK ENDING
THE ADVERTISING watchdog stamped on the postal service this week after Royal Mail broadcast a commercial in the middle of Coronation Street in which a violent bank robbery was simulated to illustrate the dangers of identity theft.
A gang of robbers in balaclavas was seen storming the building, shouting at a child and grabbing a female member of staff by the shoulder, demanding that she hand over to them her name and PIN number.
When this was over, a caption appeared on screen, encouraging us to take ownership of the problem. “Let’s beat identity fraud,” it said. We were all in this together.
The Advertising Standards Authority banned further screenings, concluding that the ad overshadowed the message it was intended to convey, and was likely to cause fear and distress, especially to victims of violence, with no justifiable reason. That it was, but it was also a smokescreen.
Identity theft is Royal Mail’s own problem; it’s endemic, and its focus should be on rooting it out – not on trying to shift the responsibility on to you and I, and upsetting us all in the process.
Let’s be clear, first of all, what identity theft, so far as it concerns the postal service, means.
It means that someone could walk into a post office and fill in a form requesting that all the mail to a given address should henceforth be redirected to an entirely different address in, oh, let’s say Brewerton Road, Oldham. That house might be unoccupied, or a squat, or pretty much anywhere else so long as it had a number screwed to the door.
The said someone could then apply for two credit cards in the name of the person whose mail had been diverted, confident that the cards would be delivered to Brewerton Road. Once received, they could be used to buy goods and services to the value of, let’s say, £7,000.
I am fairly sure of my facts here, because this is not a hypothetical example – it is exactly what happened to me.
It was in August 2009 that mail stopped arriving at my house. Normally, this would be welcome: most of it is junk from people wanting to sell me life insurance. But after a few days, when it became clear that the pattern was unusual, and having failed to get through to a human being on the automated phone line, Mrs B went to the local sorting office in Ilkley to enquire. They gave her the bum’s rush.
It was only when I found the name of the head postmaster for the area and wrote him a letter that the truth emerged. A post office counter clerk had accepted an application to have mail redirected from an address similar, but not identical, to mine. There had been no check that the applicant lived where he said, and a confirmation letter to me was never delivered.
It was a system lax beyond belief, and its ineffectiveness was compounded by the extreme dimness, and possibly even complicity, of the counter clerk and the people in the sorting office. I alerted the police and asked someone who said he was the assistant to Royal Mail’s board members in London to investigate.
The police were helpful but Royal Mail was not. It would, the assistant told me, instigate an internal inquiry but it was to remain confidential. Under no circumstances could I know the results of it.
To this day I don’t know whether they investigated at all, or spent the money on an advert telling me it was my own fault.
I do know that the first letter I received when deliveries had been reinstated was from a credit card company telling me I owed it £7,000. That was written off quickly but it took much longer to purge my credit record.
The crooks, meanwhile, quickly fled Brewerton Road and were never caught, let alone prosecuted. They can’t have been very bright – why else would they have wanted to be me? – but they were smarter than the postal service.
It was my impression at the time, and this week’s TV commercial debacle reinforces it, that Royal Mail was in a state of denial about the security shambles over which it presides. Bear that in mind if you heed its advice to post your valuables early for Christmas – especially if you’re sending them anywhere near Oldham.