A teenager was shocked to find he had crossed 12 borders after his passport had been mistakenly cancelled.
The alarming breach was discovered nearly five years later, when Jamie Crane used it to apply for a provisional driving licence and was rejected.
Jamie’s passport was inexplicably cancelled in November 2015 – five months after it was issued. He then travelled with it to Turkey four times, the US and Belgium.
It raises the nightmare possibility he could have been detained by officials in the US or Turkey because of HM Passport Office’s error.
Jamie, 17, of Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, said: “You assume your passport number is checked so they’re not letting potential extremists in or out. Clearly they can’t be making many checks.”
In November last year the Passport Office apologised for their mistake and offered Jamie, who will study computer science and maths at university next year, £42.17 for the “lost validity”.
But they said he has to apply for a new one because they could not reissue the old one.
Jamie said the Passport Office would not explain why the document had been cancelled.
He added: “I travelled six times, including to New York on a school trip, with no problem while my passport was redundant and I didn’t know.
“Somebody has cocked up badly at the passport office. Something could have gone badly wrong.”
The Passport Office did not comment on Jamie’s case.
A Home Office spokesperson said: "Internal checks are in place to prevent the use of passports which have been reported as lost or stolen, or revoked because they have been identified as fraudulent.
"Mr Crane’s passport was cancelled in error and still had remaining validity, so was not flagged as a security risk."
