LONDON, Oct 28: Some British banks have been using garbage bags to dispose of customer information in “wholly unacceptable” breaches of data protection, Britain's information commissioner said in an interview Saturday.

Richard Thomas, the country's data protection watchdog, said that his office was investigating branches of HSBC, Halifax, NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland as well as a post office.

“A number of banks have been very careless with people's personal information,” he told the Times newspaper, adding he had seen rubbish bags full of bank statements and details of a 500,000 pound (745,000 euros, 948,000 dollars) bank transfer.

The bank's the first to say, 'Be careful with your personal information, shred everything, burn everything. Don't leave any fingerprints around because identity theft is a growing problem.

But if the banks themselves are being careless with the information, that seems to me to be wholly unacceptable. Thomas added: “What we're seeing so far is highly disturbing and we need to send a very strong wake-up call. A spokesman for his office said that a number of allegations of customer data being disposed of in an inappropriate way had come to Thomas's attention in recent weeks.

An investigation which started in Southampton, southern England, had now spread across the country, the spokesman added.

The banks could face unlimited fines if the information commissioner's office was to take them to court but the spokesman said Thomas wanted banks to “sort this out” themselves.

Ian Mullen, chief executive of the British Bankers' Association, told BBC radio that instances of documents being found in dustbin bags were isolated and it was not clear whether banks were at fault.---AFP