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Spain's Supreme Court has sentenced a postman to three years and six months in prison for keeping letters containing Santander debit or credit cards and their respective PIN codes and subsequently withdrawing a total of more than 20,000 euros from cash machines. The offender, who worked in El Casar - a small town in the province of Guadalajara - had obtained money from ATMs in Madrid, Gandía (Valencia), Almeria, Murcia and Malaga. In addition to serving his sentence, the man will be obliged to pay 22,900 euros to Banco Santander as civil liability.
The Supreme Court confirmed the sentence, which was initially issued by the provincial court of Guadalajara and later appealed by the defendant. Despite the appeal, all courts found him guilty of continuous offence of breach of trust in document custody, in concurrence with a continuous offence of fraud.
After the reading of the initial verdict by the provincial court, the defendant appealed on the grounds that the sentence was based on "conjecture and supposition" in the absence of direct evidence, since no one saw him taking the cards. According to the defence, the jury had "at all times opted for the interpretation of evidence that is little or not at all solid". The convicted man argued that the images taken at one of the ATMs were not "enlightening", as the witness who testified "does not deserve the credibility granted by the court", as she had had a bad relationship with him "and only recognised him 80% and not 100%", leaving the possibility that other people had committed the crimes open.
However, the Supreme Court upheld the provincial court's decision and described the conviction of the postman as "inevitable". "The inference of the SCJ is entirely correct and cannot be described as absurd or irrational, and it is inevitable to confirm the appellant's authorship, as the jury did, referring to up to nine indications that justify the conclusion. It starts from the fact that the accused was a postman in the town to which a series of letters containing documentation from the Banco de Santander (both the cards and their PIN codes) were sent. The content of the letters, which were easily identifiable by the red envelopes, is something that anyone can identify by touch. Therefore, the accused could easily obtain the DNI numbers of the recipients," the sentence stated.
The Supreme Court stated that there are only seven postmen in the El Casar area and that the theft victims' mailboxes had not been tampered with.
Since it was proven that one of these postmen had been intercepting the letters, the head of delivery at the post office recognised the accused from the ATM images.
The Court stated that the accused was in a "precarious economic situation" and that "the withdrawal were always made on the four days after the accused worked", making "it clear that all the (plural) evidence points in one direction".
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