Fraudulent Loan Application

itsnotarace · 14 October 2016 at 9:28PM

My wife just got a loan agreement in to sign and return from Sainsbury's bank for a loan she never applied for. It has her name and our address on it, but the account number and sort code on the paperwork isn't hers.
Obviously she has called Sainsbury's and reported this and they have stopped the application She also got paperwork on from Experian Credit Matcher the same day for an account she never set up (she's also reported it to Action Fraud and Experian)

I don't get the end game of this though. Surely if someone used our address they had no chance of getting the money from the loan to their account if they needed the addressee to sign and return it. Or am i missing something?
We live in a semi detached with storm doors, so there's little chance of intercepting our mail.

Worryingly, we are applying for a mortgage at the moment and hope this hasn't messed anything up.

boo_star · 14 October 2016 at 9:36PM

itsnotarace wrote: »

My wife just got a loan agreement in to sign and return from Sainsbury's bank for a loan she never applied for. It has her name and our address on it, but the account number and sort code on the paperwork isn't hers.
Obviously she has called Sainsbury's and reported this and they have stopped the application She also got paperwork on from Experian Credit Matcher the same day for an account she never set up (she's also reported it to Action Fraud and Experian)

I don't get the end game of this though. Surely if someone used our address they had no chance of getting the money from the loan to their account if they needed the addressee to sign and return it. Or am i missing something?
We live in a semi detached with storm doors, so there's little chance of intercepting our mail.

Worryingly, we are applying for a mortgage at the moment and hope this hasn't messed anything up.

Some financial providers will provide loans without any paperwork being physically signed if everything stacks up and I believe "digital signatures" are now considered to be on an equal footing to physical signatures.

I don't know if Sainsbury's do but I supposed it's nothing ventured, nothing gained?

Westminster · 15 October 2016 at 8:31AM

I believe you can pay for CIFAS to place a marker on your credit files. However I got mine for free.

Sainsbury's should be offering to place a protective CIFAS fraud marker on your account (at their expense) - this is what Littlewoods did for me when I discovered a ID fraudulent account in my name.

This means the computer will always say 'maybe' and all applications for credit have to be checked by a person - which should be enough to put the brakes on anything dodgy. It will slightly slow down any of your own applications but its a price worth paying and a mortgage would typically go to an underwriter anyway.

jonesMUFCforever · 15 October 2016 at 11:06AM

OP have you considered that the fraudelent application could be close to home - perhaps the person was hoping to intercept the mail?

itsnotarace · 15 October 2016 at 11:33PM

The application couldn't be close to home. There's just the two of us in the house and any friends and family that come in we would trust 100%, and asides from that no one is at the house on a regular enough basis that they could possibly intercept the mail.

We're going to speak to our mortgage advisor on Monday for some advice and keep chasing with Experian/Sainsburys.

Thanks for the replies though.

Fraudulent Loan Application

Comments

Categories

Get our FREE Weekly email full of deals & guides - and it’s spam-free