There are a number of Simon Fords living in West London, of which I am one. It just so happens that there is another Simon Ford from West London who was one of 33 people convicted for being part of a drugs and money-laundering operation.
Hence the ribald comments when I arrived at work about how easily I'd escaped from custody, which, I must confess, appealed to my sense of humour.
Of course the most rudimentary check immediately shows the two Simon Fords are not one and the same. The jailed Simon Ford is younger than I am and I've never been a fire-fighter; that difference if obvious in all the coverage.
However, mistakes have happened, which is why it's dangerous to make a half-hearted effort at identification.
In an oft-quoted example, Newstead v London Express Newspapers Ltd (1940), the Daily Express reported that 'Harold Newstead, 30-year-old Camberwell man', had been sent to prison for nine months for bigamy.
The paper was successfully sued by another Harold Newstead who worked in Camberwell and who claimed the account had been understood to refer to him.
He claimed that if the words were true of another person, which they were, it was the duty of the paper to give a precise and detailed description of that person, but the paper had "recklessly struck out" the occupation and address of the person convicted.
So where do you look if you're investigating somebody and you want to negative-check their identity - if you've got the 'right' Simon Ford?
LexisNexis is a database of newspaper reports and articles that's the online equivalent of the old-fashioned cuttings library. If, for instance, an individual has previous convictions, and they were reported, chances are they'll appear in here.
In addition, Corporate.192.com contains details from the Electoral Roll - and BBC journalists can access both of the above from their desktop.
Another search might take you to Companies House, the government's official register of all UK companies.
Websites such as LinkedIn contain details about professionals but once you leave the realm of officially compiled data expect the information to be much less reliable.
Stuff you find on social networking sites, for instance, needs careful corroboration. But somebody's Facebook page might throw up a significant lead that you can cross-reference and corroborate through other sources.
All of which makes me wonder how many people have been looking at my Facebook profile over the past 24 hours. Facebook says it doesn't provide that information - although there may be some dubious pieces of software around that claim to be able to.
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