by Serguey Shinder
In June 2024 our timber branch near Maidstone opened a thirty day account for a roofing contractor that had been trading in Kent for twenty two years. The application arrived by email, complete and neatly filled in. The company number matched the public register. The directors' names matched. The credit agency gave it one of the best scores we saw that month, and our credit team set a limit of fifteen thousand pounds, which was cautious for a firm of that size.
Over the next nine days the account ordered battens, membrane, lead and tiles, a little over fourteen thousand pounds, every load delivered to a new site address on an industrial estate in Essex. When the first statement went to the registered office, the real roofing company rang us to ask who we were. They had never applied for an account with us. Somebody else had borrowed their name.
Nothing in our process had failed. Every check we made was answered correctly, because every check was about the company, and the company was real and creditworthy. The person on the other end of the email was not that company. The address was on a domain one letter different from theirs. The phone number on the form was a mobile. The delivery address was one the firm had never used. None of it was hidden, and none of it was asked about, because a credit check is built to answer one question: will this company pay? It has nothing to say about whether you are talking to it.
We looked back two years and found three other accounts with the same pattern, under different names, which had been written off as ordinary bad debts.
Identity is now a separate question from credit, with its own checks. When an application arrives, we ring the company on a number taken from its own website or a directory, never the number on the form, and ask whether they applied. A letter goes to the registered office confirming that an account has been opened, so a real company finds out within days if it was not them. The first deliveries on any new account go to the registered address or to a site the company has confirmed to us directly, and any new delivery address in the first three months waits until somebody has checked it. The email domain on every application is compared with the company's own.
Two applications have stopped at the phone call since, both for well known local firms, neither of which had heard of us.
The roofing company has an account with us now, opened properly, and its office manager is the person who rings us when a delivery looks odd.
A credit check tells you a company is good for the money. It does not tell you that the company is the one asking.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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