DETAILS of customers’ bank accounts, hire purchase arrangements, driving licences and even a photocopy of a passport have been found lying on the floor of a disused Salisbury car showroom.

Student Sonja Barnfield spotted them while she was photographing the derelict Autecnique buildings in London Road for a project for her photography degree.

Spilling out of a cupboard in the showroom, which has suffered massive damage at the hands of vandals, was a heap of documents spelling out how much people paid for their Saab cars, and giving their phone numbers, dates of birth and previous addresses.

In some cases there is information about their employers, too, including company bank details, as well as full details of the vehicles being sold.

Although the paperwork is several years old, many people are likely to still have the same banking arrangements.

Former credit controller Mrs Barnfield said: “The security risks of all this information lying around were immediately obvious to me.

“We hear so much about identity fraud these days, and this is paperwork that should be highly confidential.

“I’m sure these are just the kind of details that are used to change the identity of stolen cars.”

Autecnique was closed at the end of 2006 and it is believed that the proprietor was Sanjiv Shah, who moved to Kenya.

According to the Land Registry, the buildings are owned by a company called M7 Developments Ltd, based in Shenley Wood, Milton Keynes. The property is recorded as having changed hands for £1.4million in October 2007.

The Journal asked Salisbury-based HPI Ltd, which holds the national register of new vehicles and various databases used to prevent vehicle fraud, how easy it would be for crooks to cash in on the information strewn around the Autecnique buildings.

Consumer services manager Nicola Johnson said: “All you need to clone a car are the registration number and chassis number. It’s that basic. When you buy a car there is no real checking of ID by the DVLA that I am aware of.

“I would say it would be fairly easy to pretend to be someone, and use this information to clone people’s identities or their vehicles’ identities.

The Autecnique buildings featured in a Journal ‘Eyesores’ article last week.

Mrs Barnfield, a 44-year-old mother of three who lives in Teffont, said: “I went to the showroom because I wanted to capture the emotive atmosphere of a building that once stood as a fine example of modern architecture and is now a shameful example of our modern culture of vandalism and destruction.

“It’s a beautiful building and that’s one of the reasons I chose it for my assignment. In fact, it would make a great gallery. But it’s so badly damaged it wouldn’t be an easy job for someone to tidy it up now. It looks as though it’s been deliberately targeted.”