Grandmother 'terrorised' to death after bank wrongly hounded her for £16,000

Widowed Beryl Brazier, 61, drowned in a pond after months of living in fear of bailiffs turning up on her doorstep.

Yet the £15,670 was owed to US-owned GE Capital Bank by a man she had never met - who lived some 200 miles away.

Mother-of-four Mrs Brazier owed the bank just £400.

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"They terrorised her to her death," said her daughter Susan Musk, 39. "Mum tried ringing them, writing to them and even visited the Citizen's Advice Bureau to get these people off her back - but nothing would stop them.

"When they wrote saying the case would be going to county court and they were going to send their field agents to her door, she panicked.

"They have destroyed our lives and taken the best thing that ever happened to our family."

Care assistant Mrs Brazier even paid £500 of the Surrey stranger's bill in a vain attempt to appease the debt collectors.

She was found drowned in Midway ponds near her home in Swadlincote, Derbyshire.

Deputy coroner Dr Turlough Farnan recorded a verdict of suicide at an inquest last week, adding: "This death should be carefully considered by tracing and debt collection agencies."

The saga began in 1998 when Mrs Brazier opened her account with GE Capital, also known as GE Money, the financial services division of General Electric.

Seven years later she moved from her flat in Swadlincote to a nearby address. When the bank could not contact her, it employed Wescot Credit to chase the £400 debt.

In turn, Wescot asked Datatrace UK to find Mrs Brazier's new address.

Datatrace did this but an administrative error meant the new address was registered as the Surrey debtor's, and passed on to GE Capital.

When demands in the Surrey man's name began arriving in late 2005, Mrs Brazier returned them and told the bank it had made a mistake. But the letters bearing the man's name continued.

Her son Nigel said: "She was a natural worrier and when the letters kept coming she would have been terrified of having someone battering down her door in front of her neighbours.

"She was always very careful with money. After her death we received more than £100 from the gas, electric and phone companies because she had gone into credit with all of them."

The final letter - from Thames Credit, which "bought" the debt from GE Capital - arrived a week before she died.

It warned that "field agents" would "call at your address to discuss repayment of this debt with you in person".

At the inquest, Datatrace managing partner Peter Suffield said it admitted "full responsibility" for the address blunder.

Datatrace UK, Wescot Credit and Thames Credit were unavailable for comment last night.

A GE Capital spokesman said: "It is standard industry practice to use specialist agencies to locate customers whose address details are no longer accurate."

Derbyshire South MP Mark Todd said: "We need to examine the regulation of debt collection agencies who sell debt around like a commodity.

"This allows the link to the original circumstances of the debt to become removed.

"The commodities are human beings and no one thinks of the implications of this."