The letters started arriving as soon as I first moved in to the south London house last year. They came almost weekly at first in official-looking envelopes with little plastic windows and printed addresses. Probably from banks, I thought.
The letters came addressed to one of two different people, neither of whom were myself nor my landlady, who had lived at the house for the previous seven years before moving out to rent it to me. Her family had owned it for years.
The names immediately seemed suspicious, and probably fake. I won’t repeat them out of an abundance of legal caution, just in case they actually are real people just afflicted with stupid names. But if they are real they must be the only people left in London with no social media presence, no entry on the electoral register, nothing in the phone book, and both registered to an address where, according to the long-term owners of the house, they never lived.
The names seemed fake because they sounded almost comically funny in their rhyming pronunciation. Think of those scenes from The Simpsons when Bart makes prank calls to Moe’s Tavern asking him to pass on calls to fictitious punters at the bar.
“Last name Jass, first name Hugh,” Bart sniggered down the line to Moe in one brilliant episode. “Is there a Hugh Jass here?” Moe bellowed to his guffawing clientele at the counter, before he realised he had been pranked. “I’ve got a call for a Hugh Jass. Has anybody seen a Hugh Jass around here?”
Bart’s other famous lampoons of Moe included calls for “Mike Rotch”, “Ivana Tinkle” and “Anita Bath”. The bank letters that were arriving on my London doorstep each week were for names of a reasonably similar order, although perhaps not quite as theatrically funny. Let’s just refer to them by their supposed first names, Andrius and Andris.
The landlady said post for Andrius and Andris had started to arrive a while previously: “I’m certain they’re made-up names. They’re all for overdue payments. Just throw them in the bin.”
Intrigued, I began to open them. Andris was being chased by NatWest for an unpaid £15,155 loan taken out in 2019 on which there had never been a repayment. Andrius, meanwhile, was being sought on the triple by HSBC over a loan of £21,000, another of £5,000, and an unpaid overdraft of more than £500.
As the tone of the letters from the banks’ credit departments grew increasingly stern, like bartender Moe they seemed to realise they had been punked. Andrius and Andris, if ever they were separate people or perhaps just one and the same, appeared to have defrauded these two banks out of almost £42,000 using fake identities. Perhaps their real name was Bart.
There is growing political angst in Britain about huge levels of fraud. According to figures provided by the UK parliament’s home affairs committee, up to 40 per cent of all offences in England and Wales refer to fraud. There were 3.7 million instances in 2022, easily the largest category of reported crime.
Last week leaders from police forces, including the City of London police which takes a national lead in the UK on fraud, and the National Crime Agency were hauled before the home affairs committee to answer to this political angst about a perceived lack of urgency by crime-fighting forces.
It emerged at the hearing that just 1 per cent of British police resources are given over to fighting fraud despite it being two of every five crimes committed. The conviction rate on fraud is also just 1 per cent. This is unsurprising in the context of there being just 1,500 specialist fraud police officers across the whole of Britain and its 68 million people.
The politicians on the committee, including Tory Brexiteer and former city fund manager Tim Loughton, were agog. He complained that it was unclear “where the buck stopped” for the investigation of fraud among the various agencies.
He wondered why the City of London police were the lead agency: “Why would the City of London police be remotely interested in my little old lady constituent who has been defrauded out of a few hundred quid,” he harrumphed.
Loughton also revealed he had been defrauded on his credit card “two or three times – each time for purchases of teenage dresses, for some reason”. The committee resolved to further interrogate the seemingly flailing British fight against fraud.
Meanwhile, the volume of bank love letters at my place for Andrius and Andris has lately slowed down. Occasionally there is a flurry for one or other from a credit agency. But what have they got to go on?
One of the banks recently tried a new ruse. It sent Andrius a cheque for a small amount that it said he was owed “following a review of our procedures”. Yeah, right. If Andris had received the cheque and lodged it then of course the bank would have had a sure-fire way of tracking him down.
With an illicit £15,000 in his back pocket, and little chance of being caught, what made them think he’d fall for that one?