A 61-year-old postal worker from the Japanese city of Yokohama was recently arrested for hoarding around 24,000 pieces of mail that he had failed to deliver since back in 2003.

Officials at Japan Post, the government-owned mail service, noticed there was something peculiar about the unnamed postal worker’s activity last year, and he was let go. However, the cache of hidden mail was discovered later, because it was located in his home, “which is beyond the confines of an internal inspection”. The 61-year-old admitted to failing to deliver the tens of thousands of letters and parcels, claiming that doing his job “was too much bother”. But he didn’t want his younger colleagues to think he was less capable than them, so he just hid the mail at home.

Photo: Anne-Onyme/Pixabay

“We’ll have talks with the police on the undelivered items and offer apologies to the senders and receivers as we deliver them,” a Japan Post spokesperson told reporters.

The unnamed postal worker admitted to the allegations and is now facing up to three years behind bard or a fine of up to 500,000 yen ($4,600).

Interestingly, such cases have been reported around the world several times in the last few years. A 47-year-old Argentinian postman named Manuel Guterres served a one year jail sentence in Patagonia after it was discovered that he had kept 19,000 undelivered letters.  Two years ago, a 33-year-old Italian postman was arrested when police discovered 400kg of undelivered mail in his home.