Scammers.

[TheOstrich]

Fair enough, Jo!

[Workingman]

I open mail without looking at the address - if it came through my letterbox then it's for me - or so my thinking goes.

That is technically an offence, tha knows ……..

With failing eyesight and of increasingly feeble mind they somehow get opened by accident only to get lost in the pile of 'things to sort later'. Goodness knows how some of them get Selotaped shut and marked "Opened in error" and placed back in one of those red box things by the side of the road.

[cromwell]

We had a strange occurrence a couple of years ago. Not phone related but having read Cromwell's post I did wonder if we'd start getting calls from a debt collection agency. We received a letter from HMRC, the address was correct but the name was of someone we don't know and obviously with it being a new build and us being the first occupants it wasn't some who'd lived here previously. It was an unusual name too, I searched online and could find no trace whatsoever of this person.
The correspondence was to do with self assessment and an application to start doing that.
I contacted HMRC but several more letters arrived from them over the course of a few months and eventually they sent me a form to fill out, stating that the person was unknown at our address.
I did worry though that it was someone using our address for dodgy purposes and we'd get a visit from debt collectors at some point.

We had similar when my mum died Jo. She had been the only occupant of the house since it was built but after her death we had interest in buying the house from a landlord.
Shortly afterwards we had a letter from the DSS or whatever its modern equivalent is, addressed to a woman we'd never heard of. Taking WM's cur we opened it and found that the government department would like to talk to MrsX about her claim for incapacity benefits! I rang them straight back and gave them the facts - never heard of her, never lived at the address.
Someone somewhere was definitely trying to pull a fast one.