A COUPLE who were victims of attempted identity fraud have described their horror at finding several credit cards and more than £2,000 of computer equipment ordered in their name.Pamela Thomas was first aware something was wrong when the Post Office sent her and husband Frank a letter to confirm an application to have their mail redirected from May 20 to June 20, an application they had not made and one they quickly cancelled.

Then credit card applications began arriving — for an Egg card, a MINT card, a Tesco card, Barclaycard and Lloyds MasterCard.

Next, a call from Dell, the computer technology company, trying to confirm two orders placed in Frank's name to the value of £1,400 each, paid for on the MasterCard.

Mrs Thomas said, "Dell got suspicious and contacted us and that's when we started getting rather worried about it all.

"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 fraudsters had managed to find Mr Thomas's date of birth to give to Dell but had made up his mother's maiden name for a security procedure and said he was the commercial director of a building company, when in fact he is an ex-teacher.

On contacting their bank, the Thomases found two more transactions had been made on the MasterCard, costing about £6,000 but were stopped in time by Lloyds TSB.

Like the Dell purchases, they were made on the Internet.

Mrs Thomas said, "I got very upset about all this.

"My husband was concerned to think what if this had happened to an older person, someone by themselves who couldn't cope with this kind of thing, or if you had come back off holiday to find all this money had come out?

"How could you prove you hadn't done it?

"Thankfully the Post Office does contact you to check and ask if the person who has asked for the post to be redirected is sure.

"They said it was my husband who had applied but they would not say where the redirected mail was going.

"My husband was on the phone saying, 'But it's my mail that would have been redirected!'"

The couple want other people near their home in Willingdon Park Drive to be aware of the attempted fraud and swiftly follow up any request for redirected mail.

A spokesman for Royal Mail said, "All customers wishing to use the Royal Mail redirection service undergo a number of security checks in order that their application can be verified.

"When a customer takes out a redirection a letter is always sent to the old address as a security measure to ensure that the person requesting the redirection has lived at the address and is entitled to redirect mail for the people named."

The attempted fraud is being investigated by the Post Office and the couple's bank.

Detective Inspector Ian Williams, of Sussex Police, said the police would not be involved at this stage.