Silent and Invisible "Relative"
This is such a big forum, that it seems worthwhile to mention this to see if anyone else has had a similar
experience. I'm not sure when it started, but I think it was about the time we moved almost 4 years ago. We started getting junk mail and later even occasional telemarketing calls for a person with our very rare last name and a bogus first name, "Amy".
As far as we know there is no Amy anywhere with our last name. In fact, it's safe to say we know of all the families in the US and some in Finland who have this last name. They are related to my husband by only a few degrees of separation. The ones who are not ourselves and our kids and grandkids are distant cousins, descended from DH's grandfather's brother. There are not too many families that would have such an unusual situation. Clearly, if your name is Smith, and you started getting mail for a John Smith when there is no John in your family, you might think it odd, but it wouldn't set off alarm bells.
In any case, Amy gets lots of offers for various kinds of insurance and such. It just dawned on me that maybe in addition to creating bogus accounts in actual customers' names, Wells Fargo or some other entity may have created bogus family members, or there could be a post office box for Amy that is actually being used for some kind of nefarious purpose. The most likely scenario, it seems to me, is that someone was paid by the name for contact information for advertisers, and they just made one up. The name obviously started appearing on some shared lists because the amount of junk mail for Amy seems to be increasing. Amy even appears, living at our address, if we google ourselves. So far she isn't having a lot of impact on us, doesn't take up any closet space, or eat much (other than ice cream, which quickly disappears). Maybe she's the one who's always hiding my favorite ruler and best scissors.
Should we report this to the Texas Attorney General's office? We have no evidence of actual illegal activity, just a puzzling situation. Has anyone else experienced the sudden arrival of an invisible family member?