Information on 'information' worth sharing

A 74-year-old lady received this letter from Lanstraust Malta Ltd:

Lanstraust Malta Ltd, Reg. no. C 30174, is a new company supplying credit information to businesses with a legitimate interest in it. The information is obtained from reliable sources such as court records. This is a letter informing you of an intended registration of information in your regard in the database of Lanstraust Malta.

Lanstraust Malta Limited has received the following information concerning your defaulting debts:

Source of information: Court of Justice, Case number: 2946/99M1.

Description of information: Qbid, Plaintiff: Mid-Med Bank plc.

This information will be registered in our database seven days from date of this letter unless Lanstraust Malta Limited receives confirmation that this claim has been settled in full prior to this date.

Please note that commercial enterprises, banks and other financial institutions, which in any manner, are involved in the lending of money or the granting of credit, have a legitimate interest in accessing the database. The foregoing also applies to debt-collecting agencies. Consequently, any of the above-mentioned information may be passed on to such parties.

Should you require any further information on this matter, please feel free to contact us on the telephone number quoted below. If this letter has been sent to you in error, we apologise for any inconvenience it may have caused you. Kindly read the reverse of this letter for further guidance and information. (E. Camilleri)

Ms Teresa Cassar promptly replied:

I refer to your letter dated October 24, 2002, copy of which is attached for ease of reference. Please note that I never had any account or any dealings with Mid-Med Bank plc, let alone a court case.

I strongly object to having details regarding my private life entered on to any database and reserve all my legal rights to take any legal procedures to protect my name and integrity. I also register my displeasure at the blatant invasion of privacy of the individual. This is unheard of. I am an old single woman of 74 years and you cannot imagine the fright, worry and sleepless nights I suffered through your ignoble actions.

Please ensure not to register anything confirming your actions in writing by return. (Teresa Cassar)

This letter, addressed to Lanstraust, was copied in to HSBC and myself. I asked for Lanstraust's and HSBC's comments. HSBC promptly replied to Lanstraust while copying in Ms Teresa Cassar and myself as follows:

We have been copied in with your letter addressed to Ms Teresa Cassar dated October 24, 2002, and her reply addressed to you dated October 28, 2002.

We write to confirm that warrant of seizure number 2946/99 was filed against another person bearing the same name.

The bank has not filed any judicial acts against the above mentioned Ms Teresa Cassar - the subject of this letter. (Doriette Camilleri, assistant manager - Communications & Community Services)

Subsequently, we received an explanation from Lanstraust:

We received a letter from Ms T. Cassar dated October 28, 2002, copied to you and HSBC. We received the aforementioned letter on October 30. We took the following action.

We initiated our investigation of Ms Cassar's complaint on the same day that her letter was received. Through our investigations we were able to ascertain that there was a case of mistaken identity. We tried to phone Ms Cassar on November 1 but were unable to contact her. We called her again on the following day, a Saturday, and were able to converse with her, apologise for our mistake and assure her that her details had never been and would not be included in our database. We followed up the telephone call with a letter of apology confirming that she would not be in our database.

We subsequently received a letter from HSBC dated October 31 confirming that there had been a case of mistaken identity. We replied under cover of our letter of November 5 informing them that the matter had already been rectified and that Ms Cassar had already been notified accordingly.

We sincerely regret any inconvenience that we may have caused Ms Cassar and any other persons. We have to date processed data relating to some 27,000 warrants and issued some 6,000 notification letters. We have been notified of two errors in identity to date. We believe that our procedures are robust and result in a low error rate. Where such errors have occurred we have taken action to investigate and put the matter right as soon as possible.

The notification letter like the one sent to Ms Cassar is the last in a series of verification procedures that we follow. I would like to take this opportunity to invite you to visit our offices at any time in order for us to explain the objectives of our company and its procedures. (Karl Xuereb, general manager)

I thank Teresa Cassar for sharing her experience with fellow consumers. While thanking both HSBC and Lanstraust for their comments, I stress that the above is information worth sharing with consumers in line with the consumers' right to be informed.