The “ChangeNames.co.uk” Scam

I help people change their names

As a British citizen, you can change your name for free. That’s the entire premise behind my website FreeDeedPoll.org.uk, which since 2011 has helped thousands of people change their names¹ for free and without a solicitor.

I aim to run the most-ethical service of its type:

• As noted, it’s completely free and collects no personal information whatsoever.
• It’s funded out of my own pocket so it doesn’t need to depend upon advertising.
• It’s open source so anybody can inspect my code, or run it themselves, or even set up a “competing” copy (so long as they give away the code to that, too)!
• I try to answer every email I receive from anybody who’s having difficulty with the process.²

Scammers will barely help you, but they will steal your data

Others, however, don’t.

I’m not talking about all the paid-for services. Some of them provide a useful service, albeit one that you don’t strictly need to pay for.  I’m not a fan of those that try to market themselves as “official”, though, because that just feels like fraud. No, I’m talking about a level of sliminess that goes well beyond merely charging somebody for something they’re entitled to for free.

Like… let me show you an email I received today:

I tried to visit their website but it looks like they haven’t even bought the domain name they’re advertising, yet. Just for fun, I’ve registered it and set it up as a permanent redirect to this blog post³.

Their TikTok channel exists, but it’s not at the URL they provided. So far, so incompetent.

Both their YouTube and TikTok channels provide a link not to their “website” but to a kit.com page that asks for some personal details with the promise of a deed poll at the end of it.

When you fill in the form – and obviously you shouldn’t do so using real information – you get added to a marketing email list and a handful of other mailing lists get pushed at you.

Kit.com require double-opt-in confirmation for mailing lists, but the email tries to trick you into clicking the button, saying that clicking the “confirm your subscription” button “help us know you have received the deed poll and everything works”. In reality, they’re just trying to legitimise their spamming.

And what do you get out of it after all this? A hyperlink to a publicly-accessible Google Drive folder called “Deed Polls”[sic]⁴ that a more-ethical outlet could have just linked to in the first place. it contains a couple of Word documents that require you to delete a ton of underscores in order to type your own content in.

Oh, the the templates are full of mistakes. Here’s one (there are others!):

Of all the scammy free deeds poll services I’ve seen, ChangeNames is the worst

What we’ve got here is…

1. a marketing scam pretending to be a deeds poll service,
2. being run ineptly, e.g. marketing using a domain name they haven’t yet purchased and providing broken links to their own social media,
3. that are using unethical techniques to harvest personal information,
4. in exchange for a deed poll template that’s riddled with errors. 🤦

But the really insane thing about this whole scam is that a human being found my video about my own (superior, ethical) service FreeDeedPoll.org.uk… and then figured that they’d email me to see if I’d like to pass some traffic to their (inferior, unethical) competitor.

That bit… that’s the bit that blows my mind.

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