Detectives are hunting for thousands of customers of a specialised website which provided dossiers of fake documents and advice on how to commit identity fraud. Yesterday, members of the gang which ran the site were sentenced for their roles in the multi-million pound enterprise.

The officer in charge of the investigation, Detective Inspector Tim Dowdeswell, told the Today programme that some clients of the site, called Confidential Access, went on to commit major frauds of their own.

"There are cases where people have committed fraud in excess of a million pounds," he told presenter Sarah Montague, "either some of them did actually obtain that money and some of them certainly attempted frauds in excess of a million pounds and those are the larger scale. Obviously, some of the customers were smaller customers but nonetheless that was for a fraudulent purpose and still amounts to a crime."

And he outline the scale of the operation, saying: "We can't realistically go after all 11,000 people but everybody on that list, we have their data, we've shared it with the banks and with other anti-fraud organisations to minimise the harm that they can actually commit using those false identities. Obviously, what we need to do is close those down and we'll prioritise and try and identify the people who are or have committed the most harm."

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