A Manchester woman has been wrongly accused of shoplifting toilet roll due to an apparent error with a facial recognition system. Who could have seen that one coming?

Danielle Horan was kicked out of two Home Bargain stores in Greater Manchester in May and June and had absolutely no idea what was going on (no one offered her an explanation when escorting her out).

She later discovered she was falsely accused of stealing about £10 worth of items after her photo was added to a facial recognition watchlist to prevent shoplifting.

Retail security firm Facewatch, which provides the technology, said: “We acknowledge and understand how distressing this experience must have been and the retailer has since undertaken additional staff training.”

Sure enough, the firm later reviewed the incident and saw for themselves that Danielle had paid for her items.

Danielle, who runs a makeup business, said she “thought it was a joke” when the manager of Home Bargains in Regent Road, Salford, asked her to leave the shop on 24 May.

She said: “Everyone was looking at me. All the customers at the till and I was like ‘for what?'”

Eventually, the manager told her to get in touch with Facewatch, but she tried and no one ever answered or got back to her.

She later visited another Home Bargains store in Fallowfield, Manchester, with her mum, and the same thing happened again.

“As soon as I stepped my foot over the threshold of the door, they were radioing each other and they all surrounded me and were like ‘you need to leave the store’,” she said.

“My heart sunk and I was anxious and bothered for my mum as well because she was stressed.

“But I was ready for it because of what happened the previous time. I just fought my corner and said ‘you need to tell me why’.”

After more emails to Facewatch and some more waiting around, eventually they got in touch and told her she had stolen £10 worth of toilet roll on May 8.

She easily proved to them via a bank statement that she had paid for the items, and they then checked the footage and saw the same thing for themselves.

Danielle said: “Because I was persistent I finally got somewhere but it wasn’t easy, it was really stressful.”

“My anxiety was really bad – it really played with my mind, questioning what I’ve done for days. I felt anxious and sick. My stomach was turning for a week.”

So who’s responsible for this f***-up exactly? Well, in fairness, it’s not Facewatch or the facial recognition cameras, but rather Home Bargains themselves. You see, the store submitted a picture of Danielle Horan to Facewatch by mistake, and then they added her to their shoplifter database.

BBC reached out to Home Bargains but they declined to comment.

Thus far, more than 35 people around the UK have complained of being wrongly placed on facial recognition watchlists. Even though the technology itself seems to work fine (so far), the fact that any store using Facewatch is allowed to upload faces of people they say shoplifted and have them immediately banned from a store is still pretty scary. If that’s not ripe for abuse, then I don’t know what is?

Facewatch has confirmed that the Home Bargains store responsible for Danielle Horan’s situation has been “suspended from using the Facewatch system”, so at least they’re taking these c*ck-ups seriously.

For the chilling moment a pervert was caught on CCTV targeting a teenage girl in a changing room at a leisure centre in Swansea, click HERE.