A PAIR of Brooklyn pensioners have had their home raided 50 times in the last eight years, according to a report in the New York Daily News.

The pensioners, who are not international drug dealers, don't run a pyramid scheme, and are not selling bootleg stairmasters or teeth made from lead and wood, are simply the unfortunate victims of a computer error. Well, we say simply, but when your door is kicked in at four in the morning by the police there is rarely anything simple about it.

Unfortunately for Mr and Mrs Martin, the pensioners in question, their home address was used to test a police authority computer system back in 2002, and it never got removed.

This means that sometimes as frequently as three times a week, they have had to deal with early morning door knocks from coppers looking for murderers, robbers and rapists. Which can't have been much fun. Unless you are a real attention seeker.

Thanks to the intervention of the local Daily News however, the couple have got their lives back, and unless they take part in a multi-billion dollar diamond smuggling operation or become a safe-house for the next French Connection heroin trafficking ring, they will no longer have to answer the door to SWAT teams and platoons of Brooklyn's finest.

Although the police have apparently taken the couple's address off the system, Mrs Martin, who is presumably fed up with computers already, has asked for written confirmation, in a letter, that it won't happen again.

Good luck with that. In the meantime, we expect that many of North America's largest drug cartels will be looking to rent the property themselves when it comes on the market. µ