Received a taxed vehicle notifcation to my address - do not recognised the name or car

Nasqueron

user1977 said:

Nasqueron said:

MyRealNameToo said:

seatbeltnoob said:

Received a letter to a name I dont recognised to my address. 

The font, enevelope and colour of the paper was unmistakably a DVLA letter. So I opened it, letter was "private and confidential" marked on the inside, not the outside. And in it was a registration for road tax. 

Have I broken any laws by opening the letter? Can I still tape it up and do return to sender? or do I need to pay for postage?

I live in an area where there are residents permits which get exponentially more expensive the more vehicles you have. If this scammer is using the road tax to register a residents permit in our address it could be quite expensive for us because it will mean we have 3 cars registered here. This area has a lot of cars that are a mix of car free properties and ours whcih is legacy property that can have up to 3 cars registered to it. 

I am also concered about the speeding/parking fine implications and potential for bailiffs to come at our addres. We had run ins with baliffs on a privatrely rented property. The previous occupants was chased by debtors, after we moved bailiff go their foot in the door and entered the propwert with my wife alone with two young kids wanting to see the rental agreement to prove were not the debtor. She was not able to find it as I put it away in my stacks of paperwork. 

edit: I know this is going to be asked - no this is not the landlords car, landlord is a relative of ours and they live down the road with their car registered to their address. 

Some have previously stated you always have a right to open post delivered to your address even if addressed to someone else. I dont recall them quoting legislation though and personally was always taught not to open other's mail. 

At the end of the day if you tape it up the DVLA arent going to know if someone at your address did that or if it got damaged in transit and Royal Mail or UK Mail (or whoever they use) didnt do a temporary repair job.  Stick it back in the postbox with the delivery address crossed out and "Return to Sender - Addressee Unknown" written on the front. 

Doesnt always work on the first try but it should trigger processes in the DVLA. 

As long as you have ID that shows you arent the addressee then bailiff are just an annoyance. 

Have you looked on the street to see if you can see a car with the registration? A distant neighbour used to get a lot of our post as we had a weird address any systems using the RM PAF file seemed to struggle so things got addressed to 5 Main Street rather than 5 Little Row, Main Street and delivered to the guy at the far end of Main Street rather than us. (they'd replaced a big house that was 154 Main Street with a row of 8 houses but had dropped the old number and inserted a rarely used subsidiary street name of "little row")

It is only an offence to open mail if you intend to use the data to the detriment of others

That only applies to "incorrectly delivered" items. This is a correctly delivered item because the Royal Mail has delivered to the address on the envelope (see s.125(3) of the Postal Services Act 2000). So opening it is not an offence.

Going on to commit theft, fraud etc would of course still be an offence.

Yes it's good to be AKKKHHTUALLY correct, despite it being clear in the context of what was being said 

seatbeltnoob

user1977 said:

seatbeltnoob said:

Have I broken any laws by opening the letter? Can I still tape it up and do return to sender? or do I need to pay for postage?

No, nothing illegal about opening mail addressed to your address. You can return to sender without paying anything (how would anybody make you pay?).

my concern was more that royal mail will refuse to do return to sender on an opened envelope. 

Grumpy_chap

seatbeltnoob said:

If this scammer is using the road tax to register a residents permit in our address it could be quite expensive for us because it will mean we have 3 cars registered here. 

Presumably, though, the resident permit would also be delivered to your address so you would know and could then ask the Council to cancel that permit?

MyRealNameToo

Nasqueron said:

MyRealNameToo said:

Nasqueron said:
Why bother playing detective, I wouldn't think twice of simply returning it

Because it can also be a genuine error and if you live at 9 and the cars parked on the driveway at 8 it can be a simple case of sloppy handwriting being misread. Personally would think it more neighbourly to let your neighbour know... personally with out immediate neighbours I'd much more suspect an error than something underhanded but guess this just reinforces how broken society is becoming. I wasnt suggesting driving all over town looking for the car. 

You don't know if it's theirs, you don't know if there is some funny business going on that the neighbour doesn't want you to know about etc. If it was misdelivered, I would redeliver it, I'm not hunting around the road on the off chance someone has registered their car at my address.

If its parked on their driveway it would be a reasonable good clue... again though not talking about hunting around... I walk our road most days to either go to the pub or the cornershop or just a leg stretch, it'd just be a case of seeing if there is a blue jag or whatever the document says it was.  Half the time I'd probably notice a new car on a driveway anyway.

Must be a horrible world to live in where you suspect that all your neighbours and all strangers are up to nefarious activities etc rather than it being a basic admin error

seatbeltnoob

situation sort of dealt with. 

The car was taxed with a typo. two digits easily confused. However I dont know if this was a genuine mistake or mistake due to a scheme taking place. 

I stumbled onto the car by chance, the car is never on our road but just so happened to be popping around for a bit that day and I kjust happened to pull in right behind them and the reg looked familair. 

So I quickly went in to confirm the reg on the letter to check its the same one and spoke to the driver about it. 

the showed me the logbook of their number how the road tax was entered mistakenly by the post office clerk. However I dont think the owner of the car doesnt live there, the borough i live in has a lot of car free properties (new builds) so a lot of people have no right to car parking while other people have ample rights to keep cars. The house the car is registered to is a HMO, loads of flat sharers no cars - the owner of the car is not the leaseholder as the leaseholder is a completely different ethnicity to the driver. I think the owner of the car knows someone in that HMO and has given them permission to use the address to use to regiswter for car parking. 

In the end I was just relieved it was not a much bigger scam, they showed me the logbook of the intended address so any parking, fines etc will go to their address, not mine. 

I shouldnt have done this, but I handed the car tax letter to them and asked them to fix it. Although I shouldnt have done this and done return to sender.