People may use your address for their insurance, driver's license, and proof of residence. These are totally against the law and can even help criminals get away with bigger crimes. This will cause you undue hassle and is an invasion of your personal information too.
If someone is using your address without your permission, and you're receiving post addressed to someone else, simply write 'not at this address' on the envelopes and post them back to the senders. You don't need to put new stamps on them. The senders should soon stop sending correspondence to your address.
For that, you'll need to call your local U.S. Postal Inspection Service office, which you can locate here. You can also call the general number for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service at 877-876-2455 (press option “4” to report mail fraud), or file a report online.
Identity theft happens when someone uses information about you without your permission. They could use your: name and address. credit card or bank account numbers.
The scammers divert your mail to the new mailing address where they have access. They open your mail and access your bank statements, drivers license renewals, and other sensitive information they can use to rob you or conduct financial crimes under your name.
Most of the time, if you're getting mail intended for someone else it's for one of two reasons: (1) it's for a neighbor and your postal carrier made a mistake, or (2) it's for the previous tenant or homeowner who lived at your address.
Report the fraud
and tell them what happened. Report cybercrime securely to the Australian Cyber Security Centre at ReportCyber.
When someone else uses your personal documents and financial information without your permission, it is called identity theft. In the case of theft, your credit cards, name, address, bank account details, social security number and other details can be misused.
Infotracer.com. Another easy way to do a reverse address lookup to find a list of names for who lives at any address is with Infotracer. It takes a minute to gather all the names, but when it's finished, you'll get a list of all the current and past residents, their ages, and a list of their relatives.
Using someone's address without permission is illegal.
If someone does this to you, you must take prompt and serious action. First, you need to determine if it's just a hunch or if someone is really misusing your address. Don't panic because there are simple ways to help you get out of this problem.
It is a federal crime to open or destroy mail that is not intended for you. The law provides that you can not "destroy, hide, open, or embezzle" mail that is not addressed to you. If you intentionally open or destroy someone else's mail, you are committing obstruction of correspondence, which is a felony.
There are several things that a scammer can do with your address and phone number, which is why you should always be wary when someone asks for this information if you're not sure who they are or what they want. Identity theft is one of the main reasons someone might ask for this information.
Your name and address is not enough for a scammer to scam you hence there is nothing to worry about. People could easily get your name and address online from your online sign ups. Those informations are called public information, they are the information you give out when registering for anything.
Frame you for crimes: A skilled hacker can use your IP address to impersonate you online, routing activity through your address instead of their own. Ultimately, they could frame you for buying drugs, downloading child pornography, or even creating national security threats.
To prevent this and put an end to puzzling over what to do with mail from a previous tenant from USPS, you can cross out the barcode, usually located at the upper corner of the envelope. By doing this, you are signaling to the post office system that this item is undeliverable.
With return to sender, a mail carrier will pick up the mail item, whether it's delivered to the wrong address or person or rejected, and send it back to the sender.
You have the legal right to keep it as a free gift, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Sellers aren't permitted to ask for payment for unordered items, either, and the FTC says consumers are under no obligation to even tell the seller about the wrongly delivered merchandise.
For a free DIY reverse address lookup in Australia, you'll need to use AU financial information databases and Google.com.au as an investigative tool. This is how you can find out who an AU address belongs to for free.
Census Records
Census returns can give a wealth of information on the occupants of a house at a particular time, including names, ages, sex, marital status, birth locations, relationship to the head of the household, and occupation.
To find your home's previous owners or purchase history, you'll have to search your county tax assessor's office, county recorder, or your city hall.