Pamela and Frank Thomas first had their suspicions raised when the Post Office sent them a letter to confirm an application to have their mail redirected, an application they had not made. Soon after credit card applications began to arrive at the house for an Egg card, a MINT card, a Tesco card, a Barclaycard and a Lloyds MasterCard.

Mrs Thomas said, “Luckily we were able to chop the cards up but if the mail redirection had gone through and the credit cards had gone to an unknown address, whoever was doing this could have spent all that money, got whatever they wanted to buy and then a month later when our mail started coming back to this address we would have realised we had all these bills.”

The attempted fraud is under investigation by the Post Office and the couple’s bank.