One day in August I got home from work at 6 PM to find a "sorry you were out" card from a courier company (not Royal Mail) with a time of 10:30 AM, stating that they had tried to deliver "2 valuable items", and asking me to call them to arrange a second delivery call. I hadn't ordered anything, valuable or not, so I phoned them and a lady consulted her computer and said that the driver had made a second attempt at 3:30 PM and the items had been signed for (!) However everybody had now gone home so nothing could be done until the next morning. Now I was starting to get a bit worried. I told the lady that I had ordered nothing and that I would be contacting them again the next day. I left my work phone number.
Next morning I was called by the "Security manager" of the courier company who told me that the driver had 2 parcels, addressed to me by name, from BT Mobile which she believed were mobile phones. It seemed that the driver had arrived at my house, and knocked on the door. At that moment, a guy walked into my front garden from the street, and said to the driver "I am Firstname Lastname. [my actual first and last names] Are those parcels for me?" The driver very cleverly said "Yes, sign here", and handed them over without asking to see any ID!
When I questioned this, the security manager said rather sheepishly that the driver had only been with them for 3 weeks and that the episode had "revealed training issues that we need to address".
Following this I called BT Business Mobile and spoke to a member of their fraud department, and was later called back by a manager, who told me that the fraudster had probably got my name from the electoral register, had made the order online with what was probably a created-for-the-purpose bank account (for the direct debit), that a number of recent orders ostensibly from streets in the area were looking a bit odd, that the fact that the phones were now blocked would make no difference (the idea is to sell them to some poor sap using Ebay), and that I would hear no more about it, and that my address would not be blacklisted in any way. He addded that they would be reviewing whether to use that particular courier company.
