Dear PoPville

“maybe this is a scam that everyone knows about?”


Photo by District Shots

“Dear PoPville,

We have been living in our house in for nearly 7 years and in the past month, we have started receiving mail for a “Mary Johnson” or sometimes “Mary Jackson.” At first it was mostly junk mail, but we also received what looked like legal documents from an ambulance chaser law firm that advertises on daytime TV, life insurance information (more on that later), and we’ve had two visitors to our house from confused people who appear to be legitimately asking for Mary Jackson. They claim she has called them to a) sell her house and b) get an estimate to paint her house.

When we received the life insurance info, we actually received four identical mailings on the same day with different names (Mary Jackson being one of them). We called the life insurance company and they confirmed that three of the four life insurance requests had the same phone number and DOB. They put a flag in their system in case they get any further calls using our address. When we bought our house, we certainly didn’t skip the title attorney step and even called the city today, who confirmed that we are the owners of this house. This is getting annoying and a little alarming to have people show up unannounced at your house during the quarantine, although the people are wearing masks and genuinely appear as confused as we are. If this is a scam, not sure what the scammer is getting out of it. Any insights would be appreciated.

Update:

Someone came from ADT for an installation, not our name.

Too weird.”