Should you be worried about getting mail with a different first name?
July 18, 2021 12:16 PM Subscribe
Someone I know who owns their house has been getting mail for someone with a different first name but same last name.
Their last name is so unusual that nobody else in the country has it. The wrong first name is very specific and not typically used by people in their ethnic group.
The mail has only been junky - like Express catalogs, some promo related to student loans (homeowner is not a student), etc, no real personal mail. Still, it is unsettling and they are worried about identity theft / misuse of their address. Like, did someone pretend to be their child?
1. How worried should they be?
2. Is there anything they should do to figure out where it came from?
Their last name is so unusual that nobody else in the country has it. The wrong first name is very specific and not typically used by people in their ethnic group.
The mail has only been junky - like Express catalogs, some promo related to student loans (homeowner is not a student), etc, no real personal mail. Still, it is unsettling and they are worried about identity theft / misuse of their address. Like, did someone pretend to be their child?
1. How worried should they be?
2. Is there anything they should do to figure out where it came from?
The student loan debt "relief" scammers will try any address.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone used a random first name + person's last name to fake-sign-up for something, and it got matched via last name to that address by advertisers. I wouldn't worry excessively. If a US resident, no harm in checking the credit report, though.
posted by praemunire at 12:42 PM on July 18, 2021
I wouldn't be surprised if someone used a random first name + person's last name to fake-sign-up for something, and it got matched via last name to that address by advertisers. I wouldn't worry excessively. If a US resident, no harm in checking the credit report, though.
posted by praemunire at 12:42 PM on July 18, 2021
All those places buy massive lists of people to market to. Sometimes the lists are crappy. For example, a badly OCR'd scan of a poor quality faxed list might easily have mismatched first names with the surnames on the preceding line. Somewhere else, a Jane Smith is probably puzzled about why she's suddenly getting unwanted Express catalogs with your friend's first name. (There was even a joke in a Friends episode about Chandler Bing's TV Guide being addressed to Chanandler Bong!)
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 12:49 PM on July 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 12:49 PM on July 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
You don't have to be a US citizen to be able to pull your US credit reports. Which your friend should.
posted by DarlingBri at 1:29 PM on July 18, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by DarlingBri at 1:29 PM on July 18, 2021 [3 favorites]
"Not really".
I used to receive junk mail with the wrong surname, with the only commonality in that they share the same first 3 characters. You can probably guess my surname from my handle, but I used to get junk mail addressed to Chavez or Chaney.
Unless you start getting invoices and bills, there's nothing to worry about. It's just some machines or algorithm somewhere "aggressively" trying to auto-correct some "broken" addresses and ended up linking that name with your address.
posted by kschang at 1:29 PM on July 18, 2021
I used to receive junk mail with the wrong surname, with the only commonality in that they share the same first 3 characters. You can probably guess my surname from my handle, but I used to get junk mail addressed to Chavez or Chaney.
Unless you start getting invoices and bills, there's nothing to worry about. It's just some machines or algorithm somewhere "aggressively" trying to auto-correct some "broken" addresses and ended up linking that name with your address.
posted by kschang at 1:29 PM on July 18, 2021
My partner has a last name with a space in it, and we get _all kinds of permutations_ of junk mail since we purchased a house last year. Its actually kind of convenient, because we know that despite a lot of it claiming to be from our lender, we can just bin anything that calls her by any of the weird names that the algorythm seems to come up with.
I do also think there is some OCR involved at some point, given that we get a bunch of mail calling me "Gulian" for some reason.
posted by jaymzjulian at 2:23 PM on July 18, 2021
I do also think there is some OCR involved at some point, given that we get a bunch of mail calling me "Gulian" for some reason.
posted by jaymzjulian at 2:23 PM on July 18, 2021
"I wouldn't be surprised if someone used a random first name + person's last name to fake-sign-up for something, and it got matched via last name to that address by advertisers"
I think this is it.
There was a thread recently about how data brokers match names to addresses. What I suspect happened in your case is that some random person whom neither you nor your friend know gives out a fake name on things that they sign up for but don't actually want to hear from. Kind of like how most people now have an email address for spam. They probably tried to come up with a fake name that at least sounds plausible while still being fake (something like Cheesy McSprinkleberries), and it sounds like the came darn close. They're one person (Friend McSprinkleberries) away from a truly fake name. But when data brokers see rare names like that, they can make assumptions. If, until just recently, there was only one person named McSprinkleberries in the entire US, and now there are two, it's usually a pretty safe assumption that the second is somehow related to the first one. Maybe a spouse, maybe a kid, who knows? Data brokers aren't in the business of mapping family trees. Whatever the relation, they think it's a safe better that Friend McSprinkleberries at least knows Cheesy McSprinkleberries somehow well enough that they could pass on Cheesy's mail if it accidentally goes to Friend. They of course don't have any way to know that Cheesy doesn't exist and Friend is the last of the McSprinkleberries line in the US.
So yeah, probably not a big deal.
posted by kevinbelt at 6:20 PM on July 18, 2021 [3 favorites]
I think this is it.
There was a thread recently about how data brokers match names to addresses. What I suspect happened in your case is that some random person whom neither you nor your friend know gives out a fake name on things that they sign up for but don't actually want to hear from. Kind of like how most people now have an email address for spam. They probably tried to come up with a fake name that at least sounds plausible while still being fake (something like Cheesy McSprinkleberries), and it sounds like the came darn close. They're one person (Friend McSprinkleberries) away from a truly fake name. But when data brokers see rare names like that, they can make assumptions. If, until just recently, there was only one person named McSprinkleberries in the entire US, and now there are two, it's usually a pretty safe assumption that the second is somehow related to the first one. Maybe a spouse, maybe a kid, who knows? Data brokers aren't in the business of mapping family trees. Whatever the relation, they think it's a safe better that Friend McSprinkleberries at least knows Cheesy McSprinkleberries somehow well enough that they could pass on Cheesy's mail if it accidentally goes to Friend. They of course don't have any way to know that Cheesy doesn't exist and Friend is the last of the McSprinkleberries line in the US.
So yeah, probably not a big deal.
posted by kevinbelt at 6:20 PM on July 18, 2021 [3 favorites]
This has happened to us, and I usually don't worry too much about it if it is just junk mail. If you want to get aggressive about trying to stop it, there is some advice here from the FTC.
The one time I did do something about it was when this "person" started receiving credit card offers and I was also a bit worried about identity theft. I called up the credit card company in question and told them there was no such person at this address, and never had been, and to take the name/address off their mailing lists.
posted by gudrun at 8:27 AM on July 19, 2021 [1 favorite]
The one time I did do something about it was when this "person" started receiving credit card offers and I was also a bit worried about identity theft. I called up the credit card company in question and told them there was no such person at this address, and never had been, and to take the name/address off their mailing lists.
posted by gudrun at 8:27 AM on July 19, 2021 [1 favorite]
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If the person is a US citizen they should get copies of their credit reports from all three agencies -- it's free once a year (really, everyone should do this -- I usually do it around the same time I file my taxes just because it's easy to remember for me). If any names or addresses unfamiliar to them show up on the actual credit reports, they should contest it immediately and put a freeze on their credit.
posted by erst at 12:27 PM on July 18, 2021 [3 favorites]