A legal dispute resulted in the bank using a private eye to access a customer's credit rating file – and he wants to know why

If you were embroiled in a dispute with your bank, how would you feel if you discovered that, unbeknown to you, private detectives had accessed your credit report to get the lowdown on your finances? Perhaps you would be shocked and consider it a breach of your privacy, as there are tight controls on who can carry out a search of your credit report – it can only be done with your permission. Or maybe you wouldn't be particularly surprised, on the basis that it's not unheard of for private investigators to get involved when two sides are locked in a dispute. Last year Gary Gadston was immersed in a legal battle with NatWest over a property deal (the case later went to court and a settlement was reached in November). He decided to request a copy of his Experian credit report to check there was nothing nasty lurking there that he needed to know about.

On receiving it, he was delighted to see that his credit score was the maximum 999 – but less delighted to see that a search of his file had been made in May last year by a company he had never heard of, Hogan & Co. No information was provided about who this firm was and why it was looking at his personal credit file, and a call to Experian shed little light. So Gadston googled Hogan & Co, and found it was a firm of private investigators, based in Surrey and trading as Hogan International, that offered services ranging from fraud probes to surveillance. According to press reports, the firm was hired to interview some of the witnesses in the Madeleine McCann case, and also investigated one of the 7/7 suicide bombers before the attacks in London in 2005 and after the man's bank became suspicious of his spending patterns......Read more here