Is it illegal to send mail through the US Postal Service with a missing or fake return address? Is this illegal: Let's say someone wants to send a letter to a recipient. But if the sender were to put the correct return address and name on the letter that it likely will be thrown away by the recipient unopened. So they put the name of a fictitious or incorrect name and return address on the letter, or they put the name and address of a legitimate business (but not theirs) on the letter in hopes that the recipient will open it and at least read the first page of the letter (which would then get them to read the rest of it). What laws does this break? I'm thinking 18 U.S. Code § 1342 - Fictitious name or address, but not sure if it breaks this or others. There is nothing in the letter except information. There is no attempt to obtain money, make any trade, nor anything else except the content of the letter, which is simply factual information only.
First, return addresses are intended simply to provide a mechanism by which an undeliverable or returned letter can be returned to the sender. If you have a practical concern then consider the following: I worked for the postal service and never experienced an instance where anyone cared whether there was an accurate return address except in the following cases: As mentioned above, a letter was refused or otherwise undeliverable, and an attempt will be made to return the letter to the return address. In cases of a false, unreadable, or non-existent return address, the letter will be marked undeliverable and likely destroyed or recycled. Someone is trying to scam the system by putting an identical address on each the delivery and return address of a mail piece, especially on mail pieces that have insufficient postage. If caught, this mail piece will go to the delivery address the same as any other case of insufficient postage, with a postage due requirement for the recipient. However, in this case this piece will be held and eventually destroyed rather than returning to sender, since it does not have a non-identical return address. The content of the mail piece is illegal (e.g. anthrax, drugs, etc. made apparent by forensic equipment or by a piece of mail being inadvertently opened/destroyed by a machine and discovered by a postal employee). In these cases the mail piece will be sent to the postal inspection service (most plants have one in-house). These postal inspectors might have use for a return address in the event that the sender was dumb enough to include an accurate return address on an illegal mail piece. 18 U.S. Code § 1342 penalizes those who commit crimes under false names, and uses broad language to include people who use pseudonyms to avoid detection, since these actions make the job of postal inspectors much more difficult. The final language also makes opening mail address to people other than one's self illegal, though this is likely described elsewhere, too. It does not pertain to false return addresses, unless someone were to open the letter upon return, despite that person not being the return addressee, or committing some other crime using the postal service. The only situations where I can see your hypothetical situation becoming a concern for postal inspectors or postal regulators would be: The mail piece masquerades as a certified, registered, or other special class of mail. There are many junk mailings out there that look surprisingly similar to the protected classes of mail, but are distinct enough to not raise any serious concerns (e.g. "CONFIDENTIAL", "URGENT", or various green or red markings). The penalty would probably be a fine in the amount of each identified letter times the price for the corresponding postal product. The return address is for a governmental entity, or possibly an annoyed person or company, but not actually sent from these locations. I suspect this is the possibility most relevant to your question. However, this is unlikely to raise any concern, unless a recipient or other affected party raises a fraud concern (18 USC 1341, 1342 &amp; 1345; 39 USC 3005 &amp; 3007) with the postal service. This would be taken on by the postal inspection service, which would investigate the content of the mailings for any signs of the actual sender, and they may attempt a variety of other methods (e.g. tracing letter meters, surveillance) to locate the source of the mail. However, the legal penalties would probably be fraud-related and might fall outside postal regulations per se, but could include federal laws about committing crimes that leverage the mail service, and various other laws if this is done across state lines (also this might invite FBI attention).
In the Netherlands, this qualifies as a deceptive trade practice (misleidende handelspraktijk) and is therefore directly illegal. It's likely also an unfair trade practice, (oneerlijke handelspraktijk) as the claim appears intended for end consumers. This means that the seller cannot count on the consumer knowing anythong about stuffase. It is a dutch implementation of EU directive 2005/29/EG, so similar laws apply in other EU countries. But the illegal per se part might vary.
In the UK it is an offence to cause a computer to gain unauthorised access to any program or data held in any computer (s1 Computer Misuse Act 1990). It seems likely that other European jurisdictions have similar laws. Certainly Germany does: Penal Code 202a data espionage (German text - English translation). (I mention Germany because the linked thread does.) It might constitute theft in the jurisdiction if the finder did not take reasonable steps to find the owner - which may include informing the police of the find. Depending on the jurisdiction it might count as 'treasure' or abandoned property such that the finder is obliged to inform the authorities (the jurisdiction has the presumption of ownership of abandoned or lost property - e.g. Scotland), which then decide what to do with it. Legally speaking it seems to me that, to declare it legal, we have to get over such hurdles. [edit] There seems to be some dispute in the comments that cryptocurrency is subject to any regulation, counts as property, is something of value or is something that is owned and can be stolen, such that the person in the questioner's scenario could be held to account under the law for his behaviour. Aren't they merely numbers? No - plainly they do have value because people trade them with currency and goods and services. The UK's tax authority, HMRC, "does not consider cryptoassets to be currency or money" but sees them as having economic value because "they can be 'turned to account' - for example, exchanging them for goods, services, fiat currency (that is money declared by a government to be legal tender) or other tokens". They are "a new type of intangible asset". Individuals are liable "to pay UK tax if they are a UK resident and carry out a transaction with their tokens which is subject to UK tax". They are liable for "Income Tax and National Insurance contributions on cryptoassets which they receive from their employer as a form of non-cash payment [or from] mining, transaction confirmation or airdrops." (HMRC cryptoassets for individuals) Are they property? Something that can be owned, something that can be dishonestly appropriate (i.e. stolen)? That's the interesting dispute. Recently, the High Court of England and Wales ruled in a bitcoin ransomware-related case that "for the purpose of granting an interim injunction in the form of an interim proprietary injunction ... crypto currencies are a form of property capable of being the subject of a proprietary injunction". In that judgment there is some discussion of the authorities for considering or deciding they are property. ([2019] EWHC 3556 (Comm)) read from para 50 if not the whole judgment. In at least two other cryptocurrency-related cases the High Court treated the cryptocurrency as property. Vorotyntseva v Money-4 Limited, trading as Nebeus.com [2018] EWHC 2598 (Ch) and Liam David Robertson v Persons Unknown 2019. There was also a suggestion in the comments that the police would not understand and would not be interested. But there are several jurisdictions where people have been investigated, arrested, prosecuted and convicted of crimes relating to cryptocurrencies. A simple internet search for bitcoin theft, fraud or money laundering will result in some reports. In any case their interest or lack of it is irrelevant to what the law may say.
The lawyer referred to in that article is suing in his capacity as the recipient of spam emails under California's anti-spam law. Not every jurisdiction has a law like this. I'm from Australia. In Australia, when we make laws prohibiting something, the law usually appoints a government agency to administer the law and bring prosecutions under it, and fines are paid to the government. In contrast, America has a lot of these laws where affected individuals can sue and collect the fines personally. So under the Californian law, you can get $1,000 per email for particular kinds of spam even if you haven't actually suffered any real damage: California Business and Professions Code s 17529.5(b)(1)(B)(ii). How? You need to work out who sent the spam, get evidence to prove it, and file a claim in a Californian court. Apparently you can sue in small claims court, which saves you on filing fees. It helps if you have many email accounts, because then you will receive many emails and therefore can collect many fines. One of that lawyer's wins was in Balsam v Trancos (2012) in the Californian Court of Appeal. Another example of a judgment discussing the Californian anti-spam law is Bontrager v Showmark Media.
In the US, your experiment is problematic in several respects according to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 - Wikipedia. You can legally send unsolicited email, as long as you have an unsubscribe link in the message, and you have obtained those email addresses in a legal manner. Your project is problematic because 1) you using emails from an online dump, which more than likely came from a spam harvester, and those emails were probably not legally obtained. 2) the subject lines (and content) of the emails you send will be deceptive, because you are trying to get people to click on the link to give you data on the people who respond while not telling them the true nature of the email. 3) you will be displaying your collected data in a public manner related to those personal email addresses, after deceiving those people to the nature of your emails, and this could possibly be illegal in terms of privacy outside of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Beyond the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, in order to send all of those emails in the US, you will need to use internet service provider, which will either be a commercial business, a government entity, or and an NGO. All of those will have terms of service which probably restrict sending mass unsolicited emails using their services. This will be a worldwide project and poses no threat other than being classed as a spam email.... Wrong. You will more than likely be violating many email and privacy laws and those of many interest service providers in all of those jurisdictions, and will open yourself up to both civil and criminal liability.
If a friend uses my home address for his tax return, and he owes the IRS tons of money, will I be liable in any way? Assuming that this is an income tax or sale tax return, rather than a property tax return, generally not. The only case where you could be liable is where you were conspiring to help him evade tax collection somehow, or conspiring to evade state sales or income taxes. For example, suppose that your friend had no connection to your home in your state (Nevada) with no income taxes and has never even set foot in your state, and actually lives in a state with high income taxes (California). But your friend is using your address to falsely claim residency in Nevada with your knowledge and cooperation to avoid paying California income taxes. To make it spicy, let's assume that your friend's state income tax liability would be $400,000 in California, but $0 in Nevada. In that case, you might have felony criminal liability under California's tax evasion statutes (for which you could be extradited to California) for conspiring with your friend to evade his California income tax liability. But if you had no idea of what your friend was up to, and simply agreed to forward mail to him at your address (the way a typical mail drop company does), you would typically have no criminal or civil liability (subject to the &quot;willful blindness&quot; exception to lack of knowledge where you strongly suspect that your friend is up to no good but take a don't ask, don't tell approach). Also normally would it be a problem if he filed a tax return with my address, and I filed a tax return with the same address in the same tax year? No.
The key language to be taken notice of in that code is 'by fraud or deception'. If the property manager has provided reasonable notice of a clear-out, then the code doesn't apply due to lack of fraud or deception. But at the end of the day, just go and check the mail room on a Thursday afternoon and you shouldn't have any problems.
Given that this is a UK based company, the most applicable Act would be the Unsolicited Goods and Services Act 1971 A person who, not having reasonable cause to believe there is a right to payment, in the course of any trade or business makes a demand for payment, or asserts a present or prospective right to payment, for what he knows are unsolicited goods sent (after the commencement of this Act) to another person with a view to his acquiring them [for the purposes of his trade or business], shall be guilty of an offence and on summary conviction shall be liable to a fine not exceeding level 4 on the standard scale. This law specifically refers to [unsolicited] charges for entries in directories. You also mentioned that they're misrepresenting that a company is already a customer and sending out invoices on that basis. That would be a breach of the Fraud Act 2006 A person is in breach of this section if he dishonestly makes a false representation As to their enforceability, that answer is no. If this came before an actual judge, the judge would throw it out in a heartbeat. No agreement was made to provide a service in return for a payment and these companies rely on sending threatening letters via (seeming) third-parties precisely because they wish to avoid that level of scrutiny.