Jojo Moyes among Britons facing EU ban and €10,000 fine over border system glitches

Jojo Moyes, the bestselling novelist behind Me Before You, was stopped by French border guards after a holiday and accused of overstaying her Schengen allowance. She had spent only 23 days in the EU across six months. The culprit: her May departure from Portugal was never recorded by the EU's new digital entry and exit system (EES).

A senior border officer in Marseille delivered the warning straight. According to the consumer group Which?, Moyes was told not to try re-entering Europe until the record was fixed, or risk a €10,000 (£8,300) fine and a two-year ban. She has since hired an immigration lawyer. The EES replaced passport stamps with biometrics collected at border control in Schengen countries, but the rollout has been messy. Some countries suspended it over the summer and went back to manual stamping because of technical failures and staff shortages. On Monday it emerged the EU is suing three firms over the breakdowns.

The flaw hits travellers whose fingerprints or face were captured on arrival but not on departure, so the system never registers that they left. The rolling 180-day clock keeps running from their entry date, and anyone judged to have stayed past 90 days faces deportation or fines of up to €10,000.

Jane Nolan and her husband hit the same wall. They spent 40 days in France in April after taking LeShuttle, made no further Schengen trips, and should have 50 days left. Instead the EU's stay-checking tool told them: authorised stay not OK, zero days remaining — without showing which record caused it. Their passports were stamped by hand when they returned to the UK in June. The Telegraph reported a separate case of a British holidaymaker detained at the Italian border and deported under police guard after the system flagged her as an overstayer.

Rory Boland, editor of Which? Travel, called it unacceptable and said the lack of care shown to travellers risking fines and detention for rules they never broke was indefensible. Julia Lo Bue-Said, chief executive of the Advantage Travel Partnership, said travellers should not be penalised for a system entirely outside their control, and called for real accountability plus a straightforward way to challenge wrong records.

The Foreign Office said it was raising the inaccuracies with the European Commission and advised travellers to carry proof of when they last left the EU and to flag anomalies at the border. Travellers can check their remaining days by entering their passport number on the EES website, then ask the relevant data controller to correct any shortfall before they fly. Moyes says she has tried every avenue in the past two weeks with no luck. The European Commission has been contacted for comment.