How To Stop Getting Mail Addressed to Previous Residents

The residents moved out 10 years ago and you still getting mail addressed to them? Having debt collectors turning up on your doorstep for someone who does not live in your property anymore? How to stop it? We will tell you what to do about it, lead the way by practical example and tell you the most effective approach.

In this article we will deal with the way how to stop the mail coming to your address only. For the way how to deal with debt collectors coming to see someone who does not live on your address anymore, click the link at the end.

What rights do you have?

Data Protection Act 2018 / GDPR / ICO – both legislation (in the statutes) and the Information Commissioner’s Office (in their guidance) state that the data controller, the sender, needs to keep data accurate and up to date. In theory it means that the sender must ensure that the data on his record is correct. If he holds a record of previous resident name and associates it with your address, it is incorrect and clearly not up to date. If you let the sender know about the error, he must take steps to correct it. If he does not, you can report the sender to the ICO, in some cases even to the Police. Furthermore, if someone deliberately associates his personal details, his name, with your address without your consent, it amounts to fraud. There is, however, one way which nobody mentioned before and which gets you the desired outcome – stopping the mail coming.

What can you do about it?

As first step, you can try to write on the envelope “NOT ON THIS ADDRESS” and threw it back to the post box. However, from our experience, this will have no effect in reality apart from that you will feel good that you have done something to stop coming mail.

The mail will not stop coming. Therefore, you will decide to be manly and open the envelope to find out who is sending the letters so you can contact them and ask them to stop. This approach, however, has its own burdens. For example, there is the Postal Services Act 2000 that assure that it is an offence to open someone else’s mail without consent or reasonable excuse and you could face a fine or a prison sentence (6 months – 2 years). The UK has great laws but almost no enforcement. It can be argued that it is reasonable to open the letter addressed to previous resident because you already tried to tell the sender that the resident does not live on your address but the sender ignored it. Thus, the question is who is really being unreasonable in these circumstances. If nobody sees you open the letter belonging to another, who will report you to be found out? You will get result more likely by opening the letter, phoning the sender and asking him to update his records, as the addressee does not live on your address anymore.

If you are lucky, the sender takes notice and the letters will stop coming. If you are unlucky as we were, you will get running in the sender’s phone loop and then disconnected. You can listen our experience with one of the sender here (5 mins audio). In such case, then you can log complaint with the ICO. The complaint we sent in our case you can find here (5 mins read). The ICO have 30 days to let you know if they are going to look at it and then literally indefinite time to respond you but they should let you know.

If you are lucky, the ICO will confirm that they will deal with your case and hopefully the letters will stop coming. If you have acknowledgement but no further response from ICO for several months, consider it as you have been unsuccessful and complaining to ICO, from our own experience, will cost your time and gets you absolutely nowhere. You have one more option left. We found this option to be working 100% to date.

If someone is using your address without your consent and providing your address to the data controller in connection with their name, they are committing fraud. We found that more powerful than the Police are credit rating agencies. Thus, you will write an email AND letter to all known credit agencies and inform them that they are participating in fraud because the previous resident is using your address to defraud others and the credit agencies are abetting him by not updating their records which the whole world relies them upon.

Credit agencies will never acknowledge your correspondence but the letters will stop coming after that.