BT customer trying to take over my Zen broadband

[iniltous]

Perhaps the OP can say if their address is often misidentified, or if there  are very similar addresses locally.

Presumably at some point a BT router will be delivered to their  address, the name on that delivery may give a clue to whoever made the bogus order in the first place  ,  assuming the name is recognised  as belonging to a neighbour living at a similar sounding address , it leaves little time for the OP to visit them , explaining that they have inadvertently used the wrong address on their BT order , and to convince them to contact BT immediately to cancel their  bogus order , obviously there will be no issue with them contacting BT as they will have the order reference number etc and will re able to supply and GDPR info necessary to confirm they are who they say they are , and cancel this incorrect order .

FWIW , the new OTS process supposedly requires the gaining provider to ‘match’ the address correctly before proceeding with a migration , that’s the only safeguard  and apparently  the powers that be (Ofcom ) were ‘unhappy’ with the number of orders failing due to ISP’s inability to correctly match addresses , what’s the chances that to make the OTS system appear less useless than these high  failure statistics suggested , they simply allow OTS to press ahead with orders that fail address matching ,  if that were the case it would seem to fit with this scenario, at least 2 occasions posted on this forum , and at least another one on a similar forum where an expert is concerned with money saving 

[JamesCoco]

Thanks for the discussion everyone. My experience so far has pretty much been as detailed. I’ve been in contact with a few different BT call centres now. The first one was overseas and basically shouted at me down the phone that they couldn’t do anything and I had to ask the new customer (who I do not know the name of) to call them to cancel. The second number I tried then escalated to a manager who said they couldn’t do anything for data protection reasons and that the best I could do is wait for it to transfer (at which point my line will go dead) and then request a transfer back myself. Which is obviously a tediously slow process.

@iniltous - your suggestion of waiting for a router to arrive was my next plan of action - that surely something will arrive to our address. So that’s my next best hope. Unfortunately there are over 100 new houses around us, any of which could have put in this order - and that’s assuming it was even the same area / postcode and not someone who got it completely wrong or a malicious attempt.

To be honest, the way this has all gone down just makes me think I’m better of signing up to something like Starlink, where my line can’t just be stolen away from me by an unnamed person who typed their address incorrectly, a process I, as the account holder, have no way of preventing whilst the countdown to my business going offline gets closer and closer.

[iniltous]

100 new houses around you , is this a new build development and do you have FTTP ?
It can be the case with new builds, at the time of installation of FTTP , the property is still in possession of the developer, (installed before the purchaser moves in ) and known to Openreach by the plot number …the house number and street name are secondary, if the developer misaligns plot numbers to the eventual house number/street name you can have errors introduced into the addressing system, if that were the case it’s not necessarily a person or ISP making a mistake misidentifying an address , it’s a data error .

[JamesCoco]

Ours isn’t actually a housing plot, we’re a large business adjacent to the houses so share the postcode. So we weren’t part of a development and don’t have a house number to get mixed up with, just the name of the business and then the road, area, postcode.

So someone has (presumably) entered a postcode and then selected our business location as their new address, which makes it even crazier as they would have confirmed “their address” with the first line being our company name.

[iniltous]

The fact that not only you had a business account with Zen , but the address is known by your business name makes it baffling that a residential customer could inadvertently select your business address as a residential one and start the migration process …so it’s possible that it’s a deliberate malicious act rather than a mistake, however that person wound presumably need to provide BT with some verification of their identity, should you call in the authorities if you feel this was malicious.

FWIW , the OTS system as it stands doesn’t cater for business accounts , and although it’s apparently a BT Consumer customer that has instigated this , the fact that your Zen account presumably is a bona fide business account, and registered as such , I would have thought any automated migration would fail because of this mismatch residential/business conflict, perhaps Zen are a little more culpable than first thought.