Credit reference agencies were inundated with phone calls from child-benefit claimants trying to protect their personal details yesterday. Banks and building societies also reported a rise in calls from account holders who were seeking reassurance or wanting advice on how to change their PIN.

A spokeswoman from Equifax, one of the three credit-reference agencies that offers online monitoring to help to prevent identity fraud, said: “We have been inundated with calls.”

Experian, another credit reference agency, said that there was an 85 per cent rise in the number of people who had signed up to its online credit monitoring service. Callcredit said that it had received three times more calls than usual.

The agencies said that some people were unhappy that they were being forced to pay for a copy of their credit report and asked why the Government was not providing them with free copies. Each copy of a credit report costs £2.

Revenue & Customs said that it would consider refunding the money for credit reports on individual cases.

Although consumers may notice fraudulent activity on their monthly bank statements, they may not find out for weeks or months if a conman has applied for a loan or another form of credit in their name.

Experian said that it would take an average of 16 months before consumers realised that they had been defrauded in this way.

To help to prevent this type of fraud, the credit reference agencies offer services to monitor the credit files of an individual and alert them each time that an application for credit is made. This way they can differentiate between credit applications that they have made and applications made by criminals.

Barclays, Halifax, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland and Abbey all said that they had experienced small increases in the numbers of calls from customers yesterday.

A spokesman from HSBC said “A lot of people just wanted to check it was true. They just couldn’t believe it had happened.”