Middlesbrough journalist Caroline Briggs has exposed the ease with which shoppers can run up huge credit bills.

She was able to get £1,450 credit in less than an hour as part of an Evening Gazette investigation into the lure of high street cash-free spending.

“It was easy,” Caroline told readers in a front-page trailer to her findings.

“I had no proof of my address, yet it was rare for stores to ask for anything more than a banker’s card as security.”

The investigation made a full page in the broadsheet Gazette. Caroline interviewed local women who had run up big bills and spoke to advisers who help pick up the pieces when people get in above their heads.

But the most graphic illustration of the problem was her first-person piece.

The self-confessed shopaholic said she was given £1,450 credit to spend in four high street shops, even after telling assistants that she had just moved house and had not notified her bank of the new address. She said she expected to refused on these grounds but was told this was no problem and to put her old address down.

The shops simply asked for her bank card for identification and then checked with the credit card company.

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