Two Glasgow Royal Mail AGENCY workers accused of stealing £750k from packages

[TrueBlueTerrier]

Agency is an addition to the title by me.

Two Royal Mail workers are accused of stealing £750,000 from packages and sending dirty cash to Pakistan.

Mehdi Raza, 38, and Zafran Mahmood, 34, allegedly stole the money between January 2023 and September 2024.

Court papers state the men were employed as agency workers at the Royal Mail in Glasgow's Dennistoun.

It is claimed that they took a quantity of special delivery parcels containing mobile phones and £750,000 in cash or foreign currency.

A second allegation claims that Raza was found to be in possession of £159,842 of criminal property at his home in Newton Mearns, East Renfrewshire, on September 16, 2024.

The third charge says both men concealed, transferred and removed criminal property from Scotland between January 2023 and September 2024.

It is alleged that they repeatedly transferred sums of money between one another as well as from Scotland to Pakistan.

The transfers abroad are claimed to have been to accounts in their own names as well as others there.

The charge says Raza and Mahmood, in an effort to conceal the source of the money, pretended to Barclays Bank that property in Pakistan had been sold at a value greater than what they had in fact sold it for.

It is further alleged that the pair claimed that the sold two motor vehicles when they had not.

A final fraud charge says that Raza made the false claims in an attempt to justify the source of his income to allow him to continue to have an account with Barclays Bank.

Raza and Mahmood, of the city's Knightswood, pleaded not guilty to the charges against them at Glasgow Sheriff Court.

A further hearing will take place next month.

[TopperGas]

How on earth can two agency staff steal £750K before anybody realised that Specials were going missing? If we lose just a passport in our DO then there's a big investigation, losing a Special is just once in a blue moon occurrence.

[postman1979]

Because a lot of MC use agency staff within the locker at weekends because they are cheaper than regular RM staff. Our locker is staffed on a Saturday afternoon Sunday morning/day and Sunday night by one or two RM staff and three or more agency staff. They can get at the items before they are scanned into the locker so to make it look that the were taken at the despatching MC.

[thefox]

No wonder he's staying in Newton Mearns with a side line like that.

[Mr Rush]

How on earth can two agency staff steal £750K before anybody realised that Specials were going missing? If we lose just a passport in our DO then there's a big investigation, losing a Special is just once in a blue moon occurrence.

In the stated timeframe they were allegedly stealing ~£9,000 every week. What we don't know is either the average value or volume of SDs passing through the MC cage every week. It's possible that's a drop in the ocean, whereas in a DO there's comparitively fewer specials (~100 per day, very roughly) so it would be far more noticeable if one vanishes.

Sitting at a node in the network where items are being transported in bulk makes it much easier to pick them off than being on a duty having signed a handful out the locker. All the more reason not to have agency in that position of responsibility - you want, as is often the case, someone with long service who has a lot to lose trying this on. But no, instead of PHGs it's the gig economy a-go-go.

[PDAHappy]

I heard that they were unloading the work that came via the airport and were able to intercept it before it was taken to the locker.