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Suspicion of company identity fraud

I am sole director and sole employee of a limited company.

I received an invoice from a large UK-wide office products supplier addressed to my company at its registered office. The invoice amount is zero, as the goods were paid for in advance (a modest three figure sum). However the delivery address shows my company name followed by an address I have no knowledge about in a UK city with which my company has no connection. Of course, this made me very suspicious.

I called Companies House in Cardiff and checked that no change had been made to the company details, and decided to follow the option on their website and sent in a PR1 Opt-in form for their protected online filing scheme.

I have e-mailed the supplier to disclaim any connection with the delivery address and the supply they made. I confirmed this e-mail with a formal letter with company heading.

What else might I do? Other companies may be making similar supplies without my knowledge. And what about reference agencies, assuming that someone is trying to establish a credit record for a "branch" of my company at their address?

Many thanks for any advice.

Regards,

Dieter

Reply to
dsgerda
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I've had a couple of similar incidents, in both cases they were cash purchases where the buyer had no account with the supplier. All that had happened was one of the sales staff simply selected a random account to log it against instead of making up a new account for a single purchase.

Reply to
Peter Parry

"Peter Parry" wrote

Good job it wasn't a big batch of fertilizer, with the police sniffing around it -- then coming after *your* company ... !!

Reply to
Tim

Most probably an error on the part of the supplier. If you have dealt with that supplier in the past, they have probably booked a cash sale erroneously to your account, either by mistake or through laziness.

Another possibility is that the customer is not associated with your company, but has given them information obtained from a letterhead or advertising etc. to fraudulently claim to be buying for your company. They may have done that to get a favourable discount, because the supplier only sells to companies, or maybe (worst case) to avoid paying VAT by giving your VAT number. Check the invoice you received to see whether it was inclusive or exclusive of VAT.

Reply to
Cynic

That only works for purchases from other EU member states.

Reply to
Jonathan Bryce

Why do you think that?

Reply to
Cynic

The proposition is that you are a non-VAT-registered UK person wishing to evade VAT on your purchases. You can do so by buying stuff from another EU country, pretending to be VAT-registered and giving the foreign sellers the VAT number of the business you are pretending to be. You send them the money net of VAT.

Within the UK you can't do that, because you have to send the money including VAT, and claim back the VAT from HMRC yourself.

Reply to
Ronald Raygun

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