👋 Hi! If you came here after going to ChangeNames.co.uk, congratulations: you just dodged getting scammed.
To actually change your name for free as a British citizen, without giving your personal information to scammers (or anybody else who doesn’t need it!), I suggest you use FreeDeedPoll.org.uk. Want an alternative? DeedPoll.lgbt is good too!
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.
![Screengrab from a YouTube video showing a white woman with brown-and-red hair saying "please see the FAQs for any questions you have have around deed polls[sic] and the rules." alongside a logo for "Change Names".](https://bcdn.danq.me/_q23u/2026/06/changenames-youtube-video-640x360.png)
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…
- a marketing scam pretending to be a deeds poll service,
- being run ineptly, e.g. marketing using a domain name they haven’t yet purchased and providing broken links to their own social media,
- that are using unethical techniques to harvest personal information,
- 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.
Footnotes
1 I can’t tell you exactly how many because I make a deliberate effort to collect no personal information, without which I’m unable to pin down a specific number. But I’ve had many hundreds of emails from people who’ve changed their names, and have anonymous statistics to suggest that the number is almost-certainly in the tens of thousands, maybe in the low hundreds of thousands.
2 I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve become pretty familiar with lots of relevant parts of the laws about not just names but adjacent areas like citizenship, residency, gender identity, information protection, and parental rights, and I’ve been able to point many people towards satisfactory conclusions when they’ve had more-challenging name changes.
3 It might not be working yet, depending on the state of DNS propagation, but it’ll get there in a day or so I reckon.
4 The plural of deed poll is, of course, deeds poll, but one could hardly expect these clowns to know that.
Great work!
You are, and have always been, my hero.
that’s so funny, I get a lot of emails like that (“you wrote about x, please include my link for no benefit to you!”) but this is especially silly.
Yeah, I get lots of requests, but this one was so ill-considered that I paused over the “spam” button for long enough to start thinking about it. Which is not something that works out well, for them!
Love that you bought their domain name!
Haha magic, love it !
[This comment was edited to remove the email address of an unknown stranger. Doxxing ain’t cool.]
What a bizarre thing to do.
Percieved vigilante justice I believe.
Here are the mailing configs behind the kit.com site. YOU HAVE RECIEVED NO EMAILS APART FROM THE ONE stating that here is your deed poll.
you used this email to sign up – [REMOVED: GMAIL ADDRESS, NOT DAN’S!] and have recieved one email from us. Please let me know if you want proof, we too are savvy enough to set up a website of a proof to what actions / messages you recieved in actuality.
There are no email sequences set up or to be used. Kit.com is a newsletter site and kit functions as a tool to capture key field for newsletter subcribers.
In our case, we use it to capture the WHY of people change their name. Fill in wrong details if you like, we are interested in the why. To ensure we get the why we used kit which forced you to fill that field in. Have you ever donated to charity? why do they ask you for your details if they just want your cash? Your responses are important.
We have over 300 FAQ videos on youtube and tik tok giving free advice at no cost also stating you can do this yourself in the comments and videos.
The fanciness of the site does not equal value. The output of the website is the same as a google drive download.
Happy to hop on a call with whoever just send an email and we can discuss what our aims and plans are.
So what you are telling us is, you recieved an email about getting a free deed poll. Clicked the links and got a free deed poll? and it is a scam in what way? Because you filled in personal details (which you stated you did not fill in correctly).
Do you have an iphone/samsung? Have you ever donated to a charity? Why is it that when you go to the gaurdian to read the newspaper they block you from accessing the site before you give your email? is it a scam also? Have you read your browser terms and conditions in full?
What a bizarre way of thinking. Feel free to use alternatives, it is your right! Apologies for any errors on the deed polls. They will be fixed in the next 72 hours. I set this up as a way to help others and get the word out. As it completely free, I may have been sub par with the quality. However, I do believe there are not nearly as much as proported.
The professional claim is weird because it is one of three statements – you also have a right to change your name to ‘x’ and keep you current name for professional purposes. The other claims are clearly stating what you would like your going/given names to be.
Dan, if you want to be of help. Hop on a call with me and help me make the website and deed poll better since you’re a software engineer.
Apologies for all this, I am just so astounded, a thing designed with nothing but good intentions led to this.
Did you delete our comments Dan?
I’ve temporarily hidden the comments because you doxxed somebody (who wasn’t me!) in them. I’ve emailed you details. Please read your email!
Update: the comments have now been restored, minus the stranger’s email address.