Insurance investigators accessed teen crash victim's phone records A major British insurance company employed private detectives who unlawfully obtained the mobile phone records of a 14-year-old schoolgirl who suffered brain damage after a car crash. The investigators trawled through sensitive information on the teenager and her friends, including their employment and benefits records, during an assignment to examine compensation claims the group filed after the accident. The private detectives worked for the Motor Insurers" Bureau (MIB), a body set up by Britain's biggest insurance companies to provide cover for the victims of uninsured drivers. According to court documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday, the investigators obtained phone records, employment histories, details of benefit claims and other confidential information about four young people aged 14 to 26 who survived a crash involving an open-topped Mini. The disclosure that the youngsters who suffered very severe injuries had their personal lives picked over by criminals on behalf of an insurance company has triggered outrage. Relatives of the 14-year-old are upset that she and her fellow passengers were not told by police that they had been targeted by the private detectives, who were jailed in February last year. The investigators worked for at least 102 blue-chip clients including law firms and management consultants who have escaped any censure by police. They are identified in a classified list passed by the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) to the Home Affairs Select Committee after weeks of damaging revelations in The Independent. Keith Vaz, chairman of the committee, described the news as "most disturbing" and likened the incident to the News of the World's now-notorious hacking of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler's voicemail. He said: "This is a most disturbing sequence of events. The attention has been focused so far on the client lists of private investigators who have committed criminal offences. And we will continue to pursue Soca for a full and complete account of what has happened. However, the victims of these unscrupulous activities have so far received no attention at all, and the public will be shocked at the depths to which these people have gone in order to obtain private information. The parallels between this case and that of Milly Dowler are stark. We need to find out how many other victims of this scandal there have been. Jade McDowell was a 14-year-old passenger in the Mini when it crashed into a grass bank at 130mph and rolled over six times in January 2007. The accident, near Workington, Cumbria, killed 27-year-old Andrew Thompson and left Jade, the youngest victim, with a brain haemorrhage and a punctured lung. She spent three weeks in a coma, and six years later still has difficulty walking and has slurred speech. Nerve damage has left her unable to write and she contemplated suicide. Another passenger spent six months in hospital learning to walk, talk and eat again and lost huge chunks of his memory. The driver Mark Houghton, who was high on a mixture of alcohol and cocaine, was jailed for eight years for causing death by dangerous driving and obtaining insurance by deception. A year after the accident, a private investigator was instructed to obtain Jade's mobile phone records, according to a court document obtained. There is no suggestion that the MIB was aware of or condoned any illegal or underhand activity. Jade, now 21, told the MoS she was shocked to discover she had been spied on. She said: "I was only 14. I didn't have anything private to look for. It's wrong. What were they looking for? We've not been contacted by the police to say this happened and my solicitor hasn't been told either. An MIB spokesman said: "The firms and investigators that you mention are not known to us. It's certainly not MIB's practice to use illegal methods - anything that's unauthorised or illegal is not something we'd engage in, or instruct others to do.