I was a victim of some pretty shitty ID theft over the summer and I get the impression that it was broadly unavoidable short of making my own access to credit and services significantly less easy, but I'd be interested in your view. Essentially, while I was on holiday (about a month..) a group of people managed to set up a number of retail credit accounts, and mobile phone accounts using my name, address and date of birth.

From what I've been able to piece together, they used a doctored bank statement and a utility bill to 'prove' they were me coupled with my details on the agreements they signed. Now those details are public (electoral register and company registration in the first instance) and it seems they used the latter (presumably makes it easier to pick people likely to get credit).

All in, over the space of about 4 days, they opened a couple of retail credit accounts with catalogue companies with credit limits at around £1,000 a piece but were able to collect the goods from the respective high-street shops (summaries of the agreements and bills were posted to my address..). And the same goes for the mobile phone accounts, they managed to go to a number of the major high street mobile phone shops and walk out with phones, tablets, accessories and phone contracts. Indeed, the only place they weren't able to was with the company that I actually use for my phones etc (again, summaries of the contracts and such, and the initial bills were sent to my address).

All in they walked away with several thousands of pounds in goods and a months worth of mobile data/calls etc..

Obviously when I got home I had to report it, deal with each of the companies involved (which I felt was far harder than was reasonable..) and ensure that they did what they said they would in terms of removing searches from my credit reports and ensuring I wasn't liable for any of the costs or expenditure.

So, in my view the core of the issue here was a lack of very simple anti-fraud measures by the retailers. It seems that they are happy to write off fairly significant fraud in order to make access to credit insanely easy. Indeed simply not relying on easily obtainable public information would have stopped this group dead, having the goods sent to the address associated with the account would have made it a pointless exercise too. On my part however there seems little I can do, I can (and currently have..) a protective registration in place (so in theory lenders should make more concrete checks, but that doesn't seem to stop it at the lower end of retail credit, but it does cause hassle with everything else.

Anyway... Any thoughts?