Identity Theft or Not?

Let me set the scene, I have a very small registered Limited company in the UK. It is so small I am the only one in it so basically I am self-employed. It is, in my opinion better to be a registered Ltd company to get work.

Imagine my surprise when a letter came to the company addressed to somebody else as the owner of the company. I saw this as a mailing list mistake but decide to telephone the sender of the letter and tell them of the error and ask them where they got there mailing lists from. They just said it was a mess up in their mailing list production setup and had a lot of complaints and don’t worry.

A week later another letter came for this person so I telephoned the company who sent it and they were helpful and by use of reference numbers told me where they got the list from. I then went to that company and they basically told me to get lost, they were not divulging company information.

A bit concerned I did a search on the Internet and found two people on LinkedIn stating they were owners of my company, a company in Gloucestershire (UK) apparantly trading under my company name, and numerous other cases in Asia.

I decided to seek legal advice about this as I wanted to cover my self against identity theft if these were not just innocent mistakes, which in the back of my mind I thought they were. I was given the standard advice to combat identity theft and inform the authorities that the signatories for my accounts and other business dealings had not changed and there were to be no changes in the foreseeable future. The only problem I was warned about was something called “Passing-off” where one of the other companies obtains contracts using my company name or they mess up so badly that they ruin my company name.

I have notidced that the majority of these companies have used my company name as the first word in their name, added a second name such as communications, languages, writers etc. and then abbreviated their name back to using the first word for trading purposes.

So is it identity theft or not? Can I do anything to stop them abbreviating their company name? Was there any malicious intent? Is John Andrew Smith stealing the identity of Andrew Smith if he decides to drop his first name?

Who knows? but identity theft is serious and a few years ago I would not have considered any of this a problem.