Identity theft: Our dodgy love affair with utility bills will end in tears

The belief that a gas bill proves who you are and where you live is preposterous, and actually heightens the risk of identity theft
Utility bills: BT, EDF, Thames Water
Forging one of these is child's play. Photograph: Graham Turner Graham Turner/Guardian

I've been living here since 2003, but I still can't make any sense of Britain's love affair with the utility bill. Of all the romantic
fixations, why something as ridiculous as a gas bill?

My first peek into this bizarre romance came on my second day in London. I marched into the Citibank on the Strand, sat down with a banker and said: "Here are a year's worth of Citibank US statements from my bank in San Francisco; here are a year's worth of Citibank Canada Mastercard statements from my bank in Toronto; here is my brand-new Canadian passport with a brand-new UK residency visa glued into it. Here is some money. I would like to open an account, please."

The nice banker took all this in and said: "Well, I'm afraid we'll need to see a utility bill. Something from the gas company, maybe?"

That first year in London was a dismal loop of this. Orange wouldn't open my account without a gas bill. I couldn't rent a video without one. Even my local council's parking voucher store won't accept my council tax receipt as proof of residence – they, too, wish to see the almighty gas bill before I can get a voucher to give to the builder, if he ever turns up.

Magic bill

And when it came time to renew my UK visa, the Home Office jumped on the bandwagon. It wasn't enough to swear an affidavit and produce the hundreds of pages of documentation about my financial status and residency; they couldn't grant me an extension to my stay until I had magicked up a utility bill.

Britain, why do you love your utility bills so? What is it about a
simple, laser-printed sheet of A4 that inspires such confidence? Did the manager of Citibank think that Osama in his spider hole was cursing the bad luck he had when he hired a master forger to knock off a perfect Canadian passport for me, spending so much on the effort that he couldn't afford a UKP50 printer/scanner to run up a fictional EDF bill?

Gas bills just aren't hard to forge. They aren't designed to be hard to forge. Have a close look at all your bills and count the
anti-counterfeiting measures. You won't find any.

But the same firms that print these bills – and know how easy they are to produce – treat other firms' bills as though they were imbued with magic security dust. I just ran up a lovely Citibank UK statement made out to Mr Gordon Brown of 10 Downing Street. If I want to open a mobile phone account, they'll (theoretically) accept a faxed copy of this sham document as proof positive (but they won't accept a passport).

Likewise, Citibank will happily accept my EDF or BT bill as proof of residence – but not a passport. None of these firms uses any
anti-counterfeiting measures, because it's not Citibank's problem if I rip off EDF with one of its bills, and it's not EDF's problem if I rip off Citibank.

Falling into the wrong hands

This isn't just frustrating, it's dangerous. If firms will accept cheap, no-security bills as proof of identity, then stealing someone's identity is that much easier. And the fact that so many firms require you to hand over these documents increases the possibility of your shoddy-but-vital gas bill/identity paper falling into the hands of a crook.

This week I decided to order some 32GB SD cards for my video camera. I checked out the cheapest firm on and placed an order, supplying my credit card details. After the firm had processed the transaction, they called to say that they couldn't ship my goods until I scanned in my bank statement and utility bill and sent them along.

They couldn't explain what new security this gave them; a crook who is nefarious enough to intercept my credit card and billing details is also presumably nefarious enough to pirate a copy of Photoshop. Nor could they explain how this was safe for me. I'd never heard of these people, they were just the cheapest listing on a comparison shopping service, and sending along all the information they needed to prove that they were me to, say, a banker or a phone company exposed me to all kinds of risk.

The rep was shocked when I declined to hand over my papers – and an email informed me the next day that the funds had already been taken out of my account and wouldn't be re-deposited for 1-4 business days.

Every time a merchant demands a utility bill, he creates this
double-risk: first, that he may be accepting a trivially and undetectably forged document, and second that he or his employees may use your document to impersonate you with another merchant.

This is the kind of love affair that can only end in tears.