Andrew...

£1,700 OF IMAGINARY STAMPS You run a small post office. One morning the computer says you hold £1,700 of stamps that sit nowhere in your branch. No delivery came. You ring the helpline. The helpline says.. pay. That happened to Scott Darlington in 2008. He paid £850 a month for 2 months, taken straight from his pay. The Post Office offered no investigation. Customer service at its finest. Scott Darlington ran the Alderley Edge branch of @PostOffice in Cheshire from 2005 to 2009. A subpostmaster is the person who runs your local post office, usually with their own money. He paid £154K for the branch. In case you missed the Post Office scandal, here is the short version. The Post Office used a computer system called Horizon, built by Fujitsu. It showed money missing in branches across the UK. The Post Office decided the postmasters took it. Then it prosecuted around 700 of them. Back to Scott Darlington. After the £1,700, the gaps kept growing. He says he kept the accounts looking right because the last time he asked for help, the Post Office just took the money. By February 2009 an audit put the gap at over £44K. On audit day, Post Office fraud investigators arrived. He says they told him he was suspected of a crime before the audit was even finished. They interviewed him under caution and searched his home. He says the Post Office's own report went through his bank accounts and found no evidence he stole anything. The theft charge was dropped. The false accounting charges stayed. Efficiency. His lawyers told him to plead guilty, because nobody would believe the Post Office's computer could be wrong. His daughter was 8. He pleaded guilty to avoid prison and got 3 months suspended. On the first day of his trial, the Post Office did not turn up. The judge was not happy. The Post Office then applied to recover £44K from him under the Proceeds of Crime Act and got a restraining order over his branch lease, his property and his car. It dropped the application on the day of the hearing. He was told it could not succeed. He told the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry (@PostOffInquiry) what came next. He lost the branch and the business. His landlord gave him 7 days to find £5K to avoid bankruptcy, so he sold his instruments and home studio. The conviction helped end his relationship with his daughter's mother after more than 20 years together. It left him with depression and anxiety. He passed the interview for a job, then lost it when a background check showed the conviction. He spent over 3 years unemployed and on benefits. In April 2021 the Court of Appeal quashed his conviction along with 38 others. The judges said the Post Office's failures were so bad that the prosecutions offended the conscience of the court. That came 11 years after his conviction. The ruling returned his good name, which was nice of it. He told the Inquiry the business, the lost income and the years of poverty stayed lost. The Post Office is 100% owned by the UK government. Scott Darlington says he believes the Post Office and the government department that owns it knew, or should have known. He wants those responsible held to account in public. Read his story and share it. The Post Office is hoping you scroll past. Sources: @MENnewsdesk @BBCNews @thetimes @ComputerWeekly @itvnews @PostOffInquiry