Dr Irving, I presume? No - that's the problem

Dr Irving, I presume? No - that's the problem

A year ago John Irving, a management consultant from Norwich, and his wife Jill were passing through immigration at Victoria ferry station in British Columbia, travelling from Canada to the US. 'The officer tapped my name into the computer. It immediately went into meltdown and the screen began to glow red,' Irving says. 'At which point two beefy armed guards appeared, wearing flak jackets and carrying guns. They were very polite, but it wasn't nice.'

Irving instantly knew what happened. 'It was a case of mistaken identity,' he says. He was detained for two hours.

He happens to share his name with a man wanted by US authorities: Dr John Irving, also 52, a Hampshire-based oil trader who could face 62 years in prison after being indicted by the US authorities. He is alleged to have helped to pay millions of dollars to Saddam Hussein's regime when he worked for US oil trading firm Bayoil in London, although he denies the charges and will contest any extradition application.

The two men, who have never met, have things in common, but there are significant differences: 'I'm John DH Irving and he's John DN. My date of birth is 10/10/54 and if you reverse one of those figures you have his,' explains Irving.

This confusion first arose in 2003 when Irving was refused a mortgage by the Halifax. The couple discovered they were disqualified because they had not disclosed a 'second home in Basingstoke' about which they knew nothing. An Experian credit.....continued below

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reference report revealed that both American Express and Bank of Ireland had separately and erroneously linked the Norwich Irving with the Hampshire Irving, and the report records the latter's name against the house. 'I can only assume he had an American Express card, as did I, and a clerk made a slip,' says Irving.

Irving complained to the Information Commissioner and received a ruling in his favour to break the link between him and his namesake. But it hasn't helped: 'The whole financial pack of cards began to come down. A couple of seemingly small errors mushroomed into a huge problem,' he says. The Irvings urgently needed the mortgage to pay off a number of loans: 'It was a hugely stressful time and we were getting harassed and receiving phone calls two or three times a day.'

So how do the all-powerful credit reference agencies confuse two unconnected people? While it is possible, it is very unlikely, insists Experian's James Jones. He says it 'can happen if you share the same name and similar date of birth with someone in another part of the country who has moved owing money without telling creditors'. Experian says that it removed the link immediately and that, as far as it is aware, no further problems have occurred.

Jones adds: 'Creditors use tracing services to try and find them, and credit referral agencies provide those services - one of the permitted purposes of the credit reference database. These provide possible new addresses based on customer information the lenders provide and, very occasionally, a link is made and, in fact, it isn't their customer.'

Neil Munroe, external affairs director of the other main credit referral agency, Equifax, claims to see only two or three such cases a year: 'All agencies apply some sort of intelligence by using information supplied to them to link people together. The reason this linking goes on is because there is fraud and cases of debt by people who don't disclose addresses.'