Postal Worker Jailed After Stealing £842,000 From Birthday Cards Over Seven Years

On 28 March 2025, Colin Renfrew — a night-shift Band 2 postal sorter at the Britpost Coventry Mail Centre since 2007 — was sentenced at Warwick Crown Court by HHJ Owen Briarcliff to 6 years and 3 months' imprisonment after pleading guilty on 11 February 2025 to 7 representative counts of theft contrary to section 1 of the Theft Act 1968. A confiscation order of £78,200 was imposed under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. Between August 2017 and April 2024, Renfrew used a craft blade concealed in his hi-vis breast pocket to slit the bottom seams of birthday card envelopes passing through the Greetings cage — a corner of the sorting floor unmonitored by CCTV until a 2022 upgrade — extracting cash and resealing the envelopes with pre-cut adhesive strips he had prepared at home. Britpost's forensic estimate placed the total at approximately 11,200 cards tampered with across seven years, yielding an estimated £842,500 in stolen notes. The investigation was triggered when a Birmingham grandmother reported to Britpost Customer Complaints that her grandson's birthday card had arrived empty for three consecutive years. Among the evidence recovered from Renfrew's home in Bedworth was a Tupperware box in the loft, labelled in his own handwriting "Nans 2023," containing £14,400 in banded notes still inside the original hand-addressed birthday card envelopes sent by elderly relatives to named children across England. Disclaimer: This video is a dramatization based on real events. Some visual content was created with artificial intelligence assistance. Some details have been fictionalized and all names have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.