Raw Deal: Cheeky dog ate her owner's cash!

Catriona Main (Andrew Cawley / DC Thomson)

THIS is a dog’s tale which will amaze, astound and possibly anger you.

Not many Sunday Post stories deal with money that has been recovered after it has been eaten, but that’s what happened to Catriona Main, of Balmullo in Fife.

Catriona took a credit union loan to make improvements to her garden.

While at work she’d put the cash, mostly in £20 notes, in a handbag in her bedroom for safekeeping.

Imagine her horror when she got home to discover her dog, Belle, had eaten £520 of it.

Catriona Main and her dog Belle (Andrew Cawley/DC Thomson)

Catriona is a resourceful sort of person and knew that modern bank notes are quite robust. So, as nature took its course, Belle began to produce evidence of her shameful crime in deposits made while out for walks.

Carefully and painstakingly, Catriona retrieved, washed (and rewashed) all the fragments of notes she could find. Eventually, her money laundering amassed significant fragments and serial numbers of £480 worth of notes – only £40 was lost for ever.

She attached the now not-so-filthy lucre to pieces of paper with sticky tape and put the reassembled notes in a sealed plastic package so unsuspecting bank workers wouldn’t have to handle it.

As they were all Bank of England issue, she had to send them to London so went to the post office and despatched a package “Recorded Delivery”.

However, the parcel, which was addressed to a bank, shaped like bank notes and full of pieces of paper, went missing in the post.

Royal Mail was unable to explain what had happened to it.

It then turned out that, unknown to Catriona, she should have sent the package as a “Special Delivery”, which is the safest form of postage.

She hadn’t even known Special Delivery existed, thinking that a service which required a signature for delivery would be secure.

Worse, it transpired that while Recorded Delivery will pay up to £50 for lost items, packages containing currency aren’t covered.

Royal Mail sent a letter saying it had conducted an investigation, still couldn’t find the package, but it was sorry. They enclosed a book of six first-class stamps as a further apology.

Given the lengthy and gruesome process she’d been through to recover the notes, Catriona was devastated.

But, never one to be defeated, she contacted The Bank of England, her pet insurer and even the police. No one could help.

Then she wrote to Raw Deal.

We got on to Royal Mail. It said that Recorded Delivery packages are scanned initially at post offices, but then travel with standard first-class mail until they were required to be signed for. There was still no clue as to what had happened to the scraps of money.

Eventually, after some prodding and a few false starts – and a very impressive scathing letter from Catriona – Royal Mail agreed to give her £340 compensation.

It leaves her short of the total she’d posted, but is better than six stamps.

Catriona said: “Thank you for your help. I feel if you hadn’t intervened Royal Mail wouldn’t have responded to me at all.”

No problem Catriona.

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