Unfortunately, in this case the item was delivered by Royal Mail themselves and left in our mail box, so there was no opportunity to do anything like that.
I might have bought the idea of a mechanical issue causing the opening if it had been a clean cut and the contents had been otherwise undisturbed, but with a very rough tear and the contents having apparently been shoved back into the envelope, it seems rather less likely.
>I might have bought the idea of a mechanical issue causing the opening if it had been a clean cut and the contents had been otherwise undisturbed
When an envelope gets jammed in a sorting machine and some postal worker has to quickly clear the jam, stuff the contents back, and restart the machine, what you receive will look like a complete mess.
There are certainly other plausible explanations for what I received. If there were some way I could check those stamps were legitimate, the question would be academic anyway.
The whole process is pretty daft if you think about it, though. Many of us had perfectly good stamps before. Royal Mail decided not to honour them — itself an ethically dubious policy, given how those stamps had been marketed and sold — and effectively forced us to swap them out.
To enable that, they set up a system where you had to send them old stamps collectively worth up to (IIRC) £200 without any verifiable proof of what you’d actually sent, in an envelope clearly recognisable as containing that type of stamps. Then they’d send you back replacement stamps, also in a clearly recognisable envelope, which ironically should now be voidable in the event of a problem, but evidently without any willingness on their part to actually do so. For as long as I can remember, the public have been advised never to send cash by post, so the postal service forcing everyone to send a cash substitute in clearly identifiable packaging both ways was an… interesting… strategy.
In a surprise to seemingly no-one except Royal Mail, there are now widespread reports of the clearly identifiable, untraceable, fungible value tokens going missing on the way in or their replacements themselves being replaced by counterfeits on the way back. There also seems to be a not-at-all-dodgy secondary market now, where you can buy the aforementioned replacement tokens for less than their “face value”.
However, based on my experience, Royal Mail don’t seem to think there is any problem here. Based on reports such as the one we’re discussing today, a significant number of innocent people might already be out some extra money as a result, and that money seems to be ending up with Royal Mail. A cynic might think someone had set up a scheme openly inviting theft and counterfeiting, forced a country full of people to use that scheme or lose money, ignored the obvious problems even when they were explicitly reported, and then directly profited from the criminal activity.
There actually is a return address on the back of the envelope that was open. However, given the story so far, it seems remarkably generous to trust that anything sent back there would firstly arrive at all, secondly result in a valid replacement for the affected stamps being sent, and thirdly result in that valid replacement reaching us properly.
(For avoidance of doubt, in my previous comment, I meant that we had no opportunity to refuse the delivery.)
I might have bought the idea of a mechanical issue causing the opening if it had been a clean cut and the contents had been otherwise undisturbed, but with a very rough tear and the contents having apparently been shoved back into the envelope, it seems rather less likely.