The Computer Bug that Ruined Hundreds of Lives
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- Опубликовано: 7 ноя 2023
- How and why were over 700 postal workers in the UK prosecuted for crimes they didn't commit?? This is a royally messed up story about how a corporation refused to own up to their mistakes and instead, threw hundreds of their own innocent employees under the bus. In this video, we take a deep dive into the legal drama that unfolded and find out whether justice was served.
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As someone who works in government IT, this is astonishing. Did no one wonder why there were so many people seemed to be stealing money? Such incredible incompetence and arrogance.
this is exactly what i was about to type. it's baffling.
Are we sure it wasn't just greed?
And very conveniently, the discrepancies were always in favor of the company...
Seems malicious to me
As someone who works in government IT, this is not astonishing.
this level of incompetence is the norm in central and local govt. in the uk--the post office management is probably all about years in the job rather than any genuine talent. They were spun by fujitstu salesmen and too stoopid to see things going wrong when this played out. Unbelievable that the courts didn't consider those guys defence/maybe they had lazy lawyers
People actually killed themselves, and none of the people responsible seem to have been punished in any meaningful way. Tragic on so many levels.
It's sick
Average UK story when it comes to this.
This is average all over the world. Sad and sickening.
Well, outside of EU/US, you'd probably face much worse for daring to try and hold responsible the people who own you...
If you use a gun to steal or itimidate. You go to jail.
If you are a CEO of a PLC, you get paid off.
It's not tragic, it's criminal and all those responsible should be jailed for life w/o the possibility of parole.
This is horrifying... how the hell did they not go "Huh, why has the number of people stealing went up 20,000% percent? And why do literally all of them claim it's this shitty software we forced on everyone?"
because someone has gotten very rich over this.....
I would wager that the higher ups originally got it into their heads that the people were always stealing the money. They were able to cover it up in the old paper records, but the new amazing computer program had caught them all! Just look at all that lost money the new computer is saving them!
By the time they really knew what was going on, they were too afraid of the consequences (or too deluded that they were right) to admit that something was wrong and open themselves up to people coming after them for the buggy software.
And the one who had a 200,000 pound discrepancy at ONE post office, like one small post office even does a TOTAL of 200,000 in revenue in a year?????
@@lofasz_joska How is that supposed to work? Computer errors almost never makes anybody rich. With 34 years in IT support I have never heard of it.
@@wild1234 Maybe some higher ups who are ignorant, but the video talks about a cover-up so it wasn't all higher ups.
The fact that these people were charged and convicted of false accounting and NOBODY in the prosecution actually examined the Horizon accounting to see if it was accurate is disgusting to me. A forensic accountant would be able to see the accounting errors from duplicate transactions easily. The prosecution teams who oversaw these cases should be held accountable (pun intended) for direlection of duty.
Greedy, ghoulish persons who see subordinate folk as lesser are the issue. Abolish hierarchies.
Start with your gouty head of State. Why DO you still have a monarchy anyway???
A lot of them resigned when they found out and were actively kept in the dark.
It's almost as if police and prosecutors all over the world have a major problem with corruption. 😂
@@orangejjay These prosecutions were undertaken by the Post Office, not the Crown Prosecution Service. Police and the CPS had nothing to do with it.
Well if they have to pay the money back (that was never missing) why would they. Its more money for them.
Wow! Every single post office in every area illegally withdraws £1,000 every morning at 2am! Every single one is a thief! The only conclusion I can come to, is that we must arrest every single post master!
I'm a computer programmer and can confirm that you are correct. Computers and especially computer software never make errors.
yes, software is especially reliable, no software has ever failed
@@utfigyii5987 Especially in the past. DOS 4.0 was flawless. Anywone who disag
General failure reading drive A:
Abort, Retry, Fail?
In a different context, check out that Aussie who discovered a bug that allowed him to game the system every 1 AM or midnight, every day. It's fascinating.
I’d love to know why the corporate bosses in charge of this scandal and those in Fujitsu haven’t been prosecuted and imprisoned themselves.
You have to ask?
How do you arrest the people that own everything?
Why would Fujitsu have anyone jailed? It's the UK government's fault that they gave preference to ICL, a British IT firm, even as ICL was losing millions per year. It was ICL that developed Horizon. Forensic accountants even told ICL their software was shit and ICL quashed the report.
They haven't even been fired!
What did they do? Did you even watch this video? Idiot
How could close to EVERY post office struggle with huge discrepancies in their numbers, indicating that basically all of them were stealing huge amounts of money and no alarm bells go off?
This is absolutely disgusting, so many lives ruined. There is no possible way to describe this other than wilful misconduct, and that is the mildest description I can use.
There is no compensation possible that will ever rectify the crimes committed in this case.
If they allowed alarm bells to go off then we would go deaf.
Their alarm bells went off, but they feared that they would loose clients if the information went public
So they remotely accessed the computers to tidy up the numbers and fix the bugs as they came, all the while denying anything was amiss
I was thinking the same
Horrific... They stole from sub-postmasters and the legal system did nothing. People should be thrown in jail, this wasn't a mistake but a scam.
Thank you for bringing awareness to this case.
Haven’t gotten to the end but I had a feeling after a few people that there was a bug that was PLACED not some simple mistake. Magically they never had overages huh? Only missing $ ? Lol
@@deaf2819 They had turned exploiting and abusing their own employees into a separate revenue stream.
This really reeks of the evil of post-Thatcher austerity Britain and the abuse of AI and computing to replace or "justify" the harassment of citizens.
@@deaf2819 Was thinking that too, that this "bug" always left a deficit and never a surplus, very one sided bug that was always in the companies favour...
typical uk xD sorry but this country is a joke
@@StraightOuttaPaddock I'm just so glad my parents left the UK for France.
France is no socialist utopia, but some headlines from Britain sound like they are from a third world country. I'm not sure when British people are going to get sick of Tory rule.
The lack of accountability is astounding. And the issue still isn’t over!
Sounds like decades of fighting for justice, only for the UK government and Post Office LTD to show their true incompetence and lack of care
That's what I can't understand, how is this still going on
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The heads of Post Office limited at the time if this should be prosecuted and jailed.
What is galling is the way those at the top escape any consequences
Accountability falls to the people when the corrupt state does nothing.
The incompetence in the UK govt is insane
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. I still am convinced that the UK is not a real place.
It hasn't changed at all.
I’m a little confused: is it a government entity?. Video says it’s a “publicly run corporation.” I’m in Canada and we have “crown corporations “ which are companies that have ties to the government, receive government assistance, but strive for profits. Is that what Post Office Limited is?
Nah nigga that’s MALICE
Look into the SpyCop scandal
This is bizarre
How could subpostmasters be found guilty of embezzlement without concrete evidence that they had siphoned off money into their own accounts?
Assumed guilty, the exact opposite of how the judicial system is supposed to operate
That's typical for the UK. They love telling people that they have nothing to fear as long as they have nothing to hide.
Because money is required mount a competent defence. Lots of money. Discovery is crazy expensive and well beyond the means on a normal person. Without discovery, you cannot properly interrogate the evidence against you. No interrogation means no defence. No defence means guilty.
So, without wealth, you're functionally presumed guilty.
@@syntaxlost9239also plea agreements
@@syntaxlost9239what you're saying makes no sense. The prosecution wouldn't have any proof of the crime, it is irrelevant what your defense costs.
@@d_all_in What on earth are you talking about? You do understand that proofs are reserved for mathematics. In court, what's presented is evidence. And if you were paying attention to this video, you'd know the prosecution would present the mismatched records with till takings as evidence of wrongdoing.
In order to mount a credible defence against that, the defendant's would need to interrogate that evidence and either produce a witness from Fujitsu Siemens knowledgeable of the buggy code (which would be very tricky if no one cooperates) or subpoena the source code a pay for their own expert to analyse it and provide testimony that it's bugged.
This is crazy expensive to do as it's incredibly drawn out and nobody, not even the lawyer, will do this for free.
As an IT worker, throughout my career I have seem how buggy software can be. Any company that provides or supports a public service must regularly be audited in their code and processes. Public, independent audit.
Ok bro thanks for the advice
Sadly the subcompany of Fujitsu who made the software went bankrupt and thus can't be held liable for anything.
Therac 25 is possibly the earliest example of bad software costing lives. The software controlling an earlier model of radiotherapy machine was copied over with little regard for its ability to treat cancer and not kill people with overdosing.
I think these arrogant morons both on the software dev side and the administrative side benefited heavily from the fact that back then system design favored the software vendors over the users almost strategically in order to make them overreliant upon the vendor, conveniently scapegoat the user for issues/bugs / bad outcomes, etc. By the late ‘90s higher-ed compsci curricula (at least in the U.S.) tended to emphasize much sounder software engineering practices, increasingly user-centric development/design approaches and a great emphasis on bedrock compsci and SE principles inculcated to train a generation of developers who prioritized relatively watertight engineering principles during development.
and who do you think is going to do this.
When all this was happening I was friendly with a couple that ran a village post office. They were absolutely beside themselves because of the debt they found themselves in. It had caused rifts in the family as they were all concerned they'd be blamed for the shortfall. Their two daughters refused to work in the shop anymore in case of further discrepancies. They even considered faking a robbery to account for the missing cash but they were too honest to go through with that.
I lost touch with them when they finally lost everything. I found it very sad as the whole family were such a popular, hard working and well respected part of the community. Yet they had been totally destroyed. It was only later I got to hear about all the other cases and realised they'd been victims of a much bigger issue.
Hey, real friends do not leave when shit hits the fan. Care to explain?
@@MR-vj8dnI don't know where they went after they were evicted (I wasn't there at the time). Haven't a clue where they are living now. I think they felt so embarrassed by the whole situation they just didn't keep in touch with any of us. Which is a real shame as they probably didn't appreciate how well respected they were in the community.
@@KenFullman I can understand that but that’s also so sad. I hope they found piece somewhere in their new life.
@@MR-vj8dnReal friends don't stalk their former friends once they stop answering their calls.
You'd think after five people - some of whom had been sub post masters for years - suddenly appeared to be embezzling money, someone in corporate might have said wait let's look at the computers.
There was a class element at play, the people at the top were upper-middle class, while the sub post masters were more likely to come from a working class background. There was a bias at play where they assumed that the lower classes were naturally inclined to criminality and those at higher socioeconomic standing were more "noble".
The disgusting thing is that they did ask questions and look at the computers - and then they decided it was better for the company if they covered it up rather than confessed to their mistakes and they buried those results and continued the same course of action knowing that they were getting innocent people arrested. This was all about the people in charge trying to save their own asses, at the expense of innocent people going to prison and losing tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds.
RIGHT!? 700!! How do you look at that and think "yeah that's right". Incompetence knows no bounds.
@@robokill387Yes. Thats exactly what it was about. I've met one of the top people and he was a super smug rich type.
@@gogglespisano24it's not even incompetence, it's quite clearly malicious. It's obvious higher ups decided that, rather than incur the costs of fixing the computer system they could actually make far more money prosecuting and stealing from their own employees. It's sickening and all of those in charge deserve jail for life
This is an absolutely insane story, cant believe id never heard of it before
This is well known as the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history
this is what the secret service do , they suppress information. don't trust the police.
What racial slur did they put down? N*****d don't make no fuckin sense to me
Private Eye, one of the few fearless publications that print the truth on any topic, has been reporting on this for decades (PEreader since 1965)
Possibly one of the most outrageous cases I have ever seen.
This is not enough. This is not nearly enough. People deserve to be compensated for the emotional trauma. Those who ended their own lives? The families should receive millions. This is not justice. I want real justice for these people.
Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking, 600fuckingthousandfucking pounds.
For an entire life, destroyed to such a degree, & with multiple levels of gross negligent incompetence, every 1 of them should be awarded millions.
This whole thing just stinks of corruption, how in the hell any judge seeing all these cases pop up doesn't have a lightbulb moment, just, what, are we supposed to believe someone appointed to such a highly responsible office is to thick to put 2 & 2 together...
Just complete incompetence at every level
Those responsible should have their names continually paraded in public.
How did these people get "guilty verdicts"? Surely they would need evidence of stealing the money - another bank account or something which has suspicious inputs of large amounts of cash.
How the hell did this happen?!
The criminal courts provide no protection to the innocent, they are sentencing chambers with rituals.
Sadly it's a well-known fact that the br*tish justice system is a joke. Their decision makers haven't even attempted to uphold any kind of justice for decades. All they think of is how to cover their own behinds and keep up appearances, so it follows that none of the people in charge of this farce will ever face any sort of consequence for their reprehensible actions.
plea agreements
It costs to appeal. Time, money, legal service, all of them are luxury not everyone have
You can't expect working-class people to feel confident enough to take a stand against their own government.
this is systemic failure on a level that goes so far beyond a software bug it's sickening. how were so many people wrongfully convicted? where was the proof? why was nobody in the maliciously incompetent and apathetic POL not asking why dozens upon dozens of subpostmasters were apparently stealing tens of thousands of dollars? why were some of the victims of this incompetence abandoned to such a degree they took their own lives? if everyone responsible for this faced justice, the court cases would literally never end
I've heard a lot of stories about cartoonishly evil companies/tactics but goddamn this was something else
Wow. This is another level of evil. I’ve never heard of this before.
This sounds like more than just the post office being trigger happy with arrests. The fact that they demanded the postmasters themselves “pay the money back” makes me wonder where that money went. I think they used the glitch to their advantage to make a few extra bucks.
That money hadn’t gone. It was still there but no one could be bothered looking because they were single mindedly fixed on blame
@@MePeterNicholls the errors falsely showed the money in the system as gone, so yeah that was still there, but what about the money that some postmasters desperately payed to “recoup” the false losses?
@@shortking-vp9vv yeh I’d forgot about those cases.
that would explain why they ignored complaints about the program. its just such an odd jump of logic to make
@@Viteaification right? It sounds like one of those blatant IRS scams where they’re like “you owe us money. Pay up or you’re going to jail”
It’s crazy that corporations can commit so many crimes and the higher ups nothing happens to them majorly of the time corporations will bring humanity to its knees
So sad. But this is the way capitalism has always worked. Throw away human life in order for a handful of wealthy people to make more money.
Everyone thinks "they can't do that"
You can not assume the government will punish its own employees.
@@lukegibson6044 f the government guy
@@lukegibson6044 the government didn't directly cause the issue. The government allowed a separate private entity to control the mail and THEN this happened. This was enabled by capitalism.
I remember this when it was happening, people were treated in a disgusting way, horrific even.
I didn't realise it was still going on 😬
What's that thing in your pfp?
@@jlo7770 you mean the mink? If you talking about my picture that's what it is, visited me at my boat mooring, he actually went on a mates boat, he put a video up of that. Robbie Cumming YT Channel, he does canal boat stuff for BBC tv
@@KarrierBag yeah I watched that video and your land rover in the drink.
@@jlo7770 oh my landrover, yes turns out at 56 I am epileptic I had a seizure as turned to mooring carpark went in canal even hit a tree on otherside, lucky a policeman was close by he dived in and saved my life as if he hadn't I wouldn't be here now. He was amazing, ot was dark, winter cold and he just went for it, total hero IMO.
So let me get this straight.. you mean to tell me that all of this could have been avoided if the call centers and company gave a shit enough to just fix the bugged systems REMOTELY and not have to travel anywhere to service their own machines? Yeah thats absolutely batshit crazy and hopefully in the end they all can eventually move on and live their lives.
Also, RIP to those postmasters who took their own lives over this scandal and passed away before judgement on casea. They didn't deserve any of this corporate idiacy.
It wasn't just a case of fixing. My understanding (albeit that I have no direct knowledge) was that the act of accessing the post office terminals remotely was responsible for some of the errors. There were financial transaction operations in the software which should not have been able to be interrupted (sometimes known as atomic operations) but for some reason they were interrupted. If remote access occurred while such an operation was in process, it might only be partly performed before the interruption and perhaps fully restarted afterwards. Thus part of the transaction (perhaps a debit) would happen twice while the corresponding credit to a different set of figures would only happen once. That allowed two sets of figures representing cash in the till versus cash logging in the terminal to become out of balance with no way for the Postmaster at the regional Post Office to see or correct the error.
@@GodmanchesterGoblin Where can one find programmers of such incompetence? This is rather basic stuff to any IT education. As to where one finds such criminally incompetent bosses I assume it is where the high salaries are.
@typograf62 I have no answer. Clearly, there was a complete lack of proper testing, perhaps driven by unrealistictimescales, and then the management chose to allow their prejudices to drive their decisions in apportioning blame rather than investigating properly.
@@typograf62 Where?... Fujitsu in the early 2000s would seem to be the answer you are looking for....
Typical corporate assholes.
I had to stop watching this due to how infuriating it was. Corporate execs deserve prison for this, absolutely disgusting
prison is too good.
I've met one of them. A Super smug type.
Yeah I'm struggling to get through it. Especially at the point of hearing about the 3 suicides...
@@ChoppingtonOtterI've had to deal with similarly smug employees of my email provider. Totally frustrating trying to get a useful response from them when raising concerns and issues. They once had the chutzpah to suggest that I hire a technician to fix a problem at their end, but went quiet when I asked for login credentials for the technician.
This is absolutely disgusting & those bastards need holding accountable.
This may be one of the most cruel and just down right evil things I’ve ever heard
>released 2 minutes ago
>channel I've never heard of
>high quality
Wow RUclips is actually recommending something good for once. Excited to watch this!
You won't be disappointed. Found the channel last week. Highly recommend
It’s almost a crime this channel only has 50k subs. Highly recommend
Another situation to look into would be the Robo-debt scheme that the Australian federal govt caused during 2015-2019 - people got charged for debts that they didnt have by an automatic income compliance program scheme. Theres been a royal commision into it and it changed peoiples lives for the worse. People commited suicide over these incorrect debts.
Wow. Just wow. How is this company still operational after all this came to light? For them to pay bonuses out for such a job well done is so soulless. This was a wild ride of a video. Great work guys! I wonder if it would be different if they didn't settle? It's not easy battling against a massive corporation with such deep pockets. Such an obvious cover up like come on prosecutors, this should be an open and shut case.
Did you guys in your research find any corruption on a government level? How did they let this happen? So much pointless pain caused, and for what over company reputation?? A few million from the wrong data? It's wild.
Because they are literally the UK's postal service and are owned by the government.
"I wonder if it would be different if they didn't settle?" they were literally able to prevent the release of all evidence relating to the prosecution. The UK post office has legal powers to prosecute without having to go through the public courts because they were set up directly by the monarch.
@@robokill387 damn. I wasn't sure if it was a private company or a crown corp. The fact that it's government operated makes this 100x worse. Absolutely heart breaking and evil.
@@HonestChuckleI'm not sure if I'm disgusted by the ignorance, or amused by the naivete, of you thinking the government should be expected to actually operate better than the private sector...
@@robokill387 While it's true that the government may have an interest in influencing the outcome of these court proceedings, they don't actually own Post Office Ltd or Royal Mail any more. Royal Mail was privatized in 2011, and the government sold off their remaining shares in 2015, so they no longer have any stake in the company. As part of the privatization process, Post Office Ltd was spun off in 2012, meaning that these days post is delivered by a completely different company than the one which operates retail post offices. They obviously have a business relationship - Royal Mail will still pick up post from Post Office branches - but they are separate entities without a shared parent company.
The Horizon system was introduced in 1999 (having started development in 1996), and there were reports of discrepancies from the very start, so the government could indeed potentially be legally exposed. I just thought it worth pointing out that post is one of the very many public services that have been privatised over the past few decades.
@@robokill387 At the beginning of this documentary the OP states the Post Office is publicly owned, hence the LTD. Due to theft the cases were sent to criminal court rather than civil court.
this is utterly horrifying and maddening, my god. Everyone responsible should be in prison forever
If a bug causes a company to lose profits, this will be fixed in record time with a full recall. If the bug instead causes monetary gain, there is little reason for them to fix it aside from doing the right, ethical, and legally correct thing. They will likely never be held liable for it, so the legal pressure is basically non-existent.
you'd think that if an agency was abusing the legal system putting innocent people in jail, the Government would take an interest into the abuse of its courts.
It doesn’t say much about the legal system in GB. I thought America’s justice was bad!
@thewebdiva5903 The problem here is that the Post Office was founded hundreds of years before we had a regulated police force or prosecution service. The Post Office is in effect it's own police and prosecution. They play the legal system to win their cases by trying to make the defence process too expensive for the plaintiffs. Above all else, I think the self-policing aspect is what made this case so toxic. (Edited for clarity)
My brother worked for POL literally all his life. I used to be shocked at the bonuses people in POL received for _reducing the amount of work they did!_ Those on the board paid themselves massive bonuses for cutting back deliveries, forcing postmen to literally having to run around their routes after computer systems ignored such obvious things as people do not answer their doors in milliseconds if something needs signing for and on and on and on. And it wasn't just those on the board that got fat cheques for diminishing the service. Managers down the line would get multi £10k bonuses as well - all for cutting and cutting. Does anyone else suffer from long, long queues in a post office at, say, lunchtime? Welcome to POL. I am not surprised at this report, POL has been a cash cow for multiple board members for decades, not a service that used to mean something to the public.
This is what massive incompetence and corruption looks like. Every single one of the people involved in causing this scandal should be in prison.
If this happened in the US the liability would be in the billions. The managers who lied to these people and tried to silence them should be in prison.
No it wouldn't it would be swept under the rug the records destroyed and the little guys thrown under the bus.
@@atomicskull6405 that's basically what happened here but you can only suppress this kind of thing for so long. I'm just saying in the states you get people signing mcdonald's for millions becusse their coffee was too hot so image what you would get if this kind of thing happened.
@@atomicskull6405nah, money is serious business in the US and there is ALOT of anti-gov interests that wouldn't let it sleep. Not to mention people who own guns that would've taken care it personally. FAFO.
@@lobbyskids2have you heard any executives from jp morgan, bear sterns, and other financial institutions that created 2008 crisis, ever been prosecuted? Or dupont's executives over the PFAS case? What about Flint, Michigan, water crisis case? That's right, none. Sure there are payouts, but nobody is in prison for making people poor or suffering cancer in US. So think again before implying how proud you are to the US justice system.
@@xXevilsmilesXx bullsh*t. I don't remember anyone had ever "taken it personally" to the bank execs that caused 2008 financial crisis.
First rule of thumb, if a company themselves offers self-mediation, do NOT TRUST THEM
Here's that dystopian nightmare you asked for
Thanks for bringing a new spotlight to this. In my village, the SPM here also went through this nonesense. He is the most lovely man you'll ever meet. He's always been involved with community events, goes to church multiple times a week, he's a saint. He went through this and ended up having to give back money from his retirement savings. He's 89 now, but this took such a toll on him.
It's crazy how no-one but the victims have been punished for this.
All of those judges should be disbarred and sent to prison. They should be enforcing the law, but instead they enforce the will of a private company. No wonder the UK is a collapsing shell of an empire.
The problem isn't that the judges wanted to enforce the will of a private company - there isn't any real reason for a judge to want to do that. The judge can only work with the evidence they are given, and the evidence submitted to the court about this accounting software was blatantly false. The judges were told by expert witnesses that the software could not make the errors it was alleged to have made that caused these people to be accused of theft despite that not being true. If the expert witnesses are testifying that a computer bug being responsible is not possible, the judge is basically forced to conclude there was no bug and that the money was stolen, and that the person who stole it was the person who had the access to steal it. If they had accurate information that a bug WAS possible, I suspect not a single one of these people would have been convicted by a judge - and if they were they'd have had excellent grounds to appeal the verdict as improper because a judge should not be finding anybody guilty of a crime if there is a reasonable possibility they are innocent.
@@StreakyBaconMan Judge, being told computers are perfect and do not lie, after the subpostmaster explained needing help on multiple occasions: "Guilty"
@@user-dn6kj8xc7r You obviously have learned everything you know about the legal process from movies and TV.
@@StreakyBaconMan Ah yes, of course, the UK legal system has lead to judges who don't enforce whatever private companies claim. Source: British Post Scandal.
@@user-dn6kj8xc7r It's honestly so sad when someone is so delusional they think they have it all figured out when in reality they couldn't be more wrong.
This wasn't done by "post office limited" it was done by actual people; managers, lawyers etc., these people should be made to pay for what they've done. Who was the CEO at the time, who was heading their legal department and IT department? These people should be in jail.
Such is the banality of evil
This
On the bright side, following the UK drama in Jan 2024, the CEO of the PO at the time is really in the shit and has been forced to hand back her honour. There’s also talk of cutting her pension, although questions are being asked why criminal proceedings aren’t being considered against those responsible.
This is absolutely disgusting but I also know for a fact that it's how a lot of companies and governments do business in general. For the past 25 years I've worked as a consultant and software engineer on contract, I've worked for 20 to 30 different companies, organizations and governments. Some of the stuff I've seen inside of their computers and inside of their offices, it makes this scandal look tame by comparison. Unfortunately, most of these entities force their employees to sign non-disclosure agreements which makes it extremely difficult to speak out about the problems. This is why unfettered capitalism is a failure. No entity on the planet whose primary goal is the bottom line will bypass making money for the sake of the greater good. This is why the government is supposed to exist, but the government itself is also just as corrupt.
To be clear, very rarely are the problems on an individual level, there really is no such thing as a mustache twirling villain in real life, but people are flawed and very much incompetent which is how simple computer bugs can snowball into for example nationwide fraud. These assholes deserve to be in jail and out of business.
Yep normally you'd see this in contract dispuites or civil matters. The fact the courts and justice in general failed so hugely here in a criminal prosecution is astonishing, we basically all got exploited by a company for profit (and as you say not humans, but the complex system that it is itself). How's there a jury on fraud cases like this anyway, surely it's a matter of evidential mathematics.
@@Bozebo in England they don't even do jury trials, so it was down to a judge. But yes, it would be nice to leave these types of cases up to mathematics or some fully objective system.
@@draakisback We absolutely do have jury trials here in the UK; we just don't tend to have them for civil cases like group actions. Serious criminal offences like murder are usually heard before a jury in Crown Court. The US legal system is based on English law around the time of the Revolutionary War, after all; while there are significant differences, they're more alike each other than they are a lot of other legal systems.
Capitalism? The state and just about any large enough organisation is riddled with such incidents and behaviour. More like human nature.
your subject coverage gets better and better. keep fighting for the innocents
I just can’t understand why the Post Office would have done this to start with. Like was it just laziness? Cos how on Earth did it get this far?! I do remember always seeing the photos and the headlines in the papers though. It’s madness
Not laziness, just people trying to save their own asses. Once they discovered their mistakes they had the option to either confess to the mistakes and correct them which would have been very costly, or pretend they never discovered their mistakes in the first place and continue on with the same plan of action which not only doesn't cost them anything - in many cases it made them money off these innocent people trying to pay back money that never existed to be stolen in the first place. They opted for the latter to save their own asses, because they are terrible selfish people who care more about their professional reputation than the fact their actions are directly resulting in innocent people going to jail and paying tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds that they don't owe.
Couldn’t have clicked faster, love these types of videos on random events like this.
Same
I remember when this was happening. It's still beyond me why they didnt get an independent inquiry set up with a "mock post office" to see if they experienced the same issues. The fact that innocent people were jailed for this throws the entire justice system into question.
All of these people were convicted without evidence and the post office had already been warned about the software issue by the first guy. It’s terrifying that our justice system is so unreliable and that the right people still have not been held accountable.
This is bizarre. You don’t throw someone in jail for stealing money in this manner unless the money can be traced to the persons bank accounts. Money going missing is not in itself a cause to jail someone.
The more I listen, the more pissed off I get.
The sheer amount of corporate evil on display here is astounding.
You couldn’t make this up! I’ve seen documentaries about this before and it’s heartbreaker for the subpostmasters, their family’s and anyone who was wrongly accused! Totally unforgivable! How the people at the top of Post Office management who tried to cover this up can sleep at night is beyond me!
Total respect to the subpostmasters…
Has literally NOBODY ANYWHERE in the administration rolling out this software got a braincell? Postmasters making errors is something that does happen, but only relatively rarely. Postmasters stealing is extremely rare. When you roll out a new piece of software and suddenly ALL of them are doing some combination of the two then the logical explanation is that the software is at fault. Also, even an incompetent lawyer should have little difficulty realizing that the dozens of prosecutions across the country have a common factor. These people need to sue EVERYBODY including their own incompetent defense lawyers.
the real glitch is the adminlstration who prosecutes such things instead of investigating them
And that was... The Post Office. Neither the police not the Crown Prosecution Service was involved in taking these cases to court. If was a fundamentally flawed system.
I used to work in IT. This kind of issue, (that happened 700 times??); should have set off alarm bells all over the place that the software was full of bugs. The other issue. What sort of person with a computerised system thinks they can steal thousands of pounds and get away with it? And it happened 700 times? Whoever was responsible for the coverup should be in prison for what they did.
this is eye popping, soul crushing, eye watering, heart breaking and gut wrenching all together at the same time
It's no joke nor exaggeration when I say living in the UK feels like living under a mafia.
The authorities have had a lethal stranglehold in this country for years.
The sad part is that it wasn't always like this.
You literally have a king. What do you expect?
Never give up your guns
@@jaflob6610It’s GB not the USA.
@@thewebdiva5903 ?
I knew exactly what this was going to be about from the title. Terrifying. There’s a great podcast about this.
The Great Post Office Trial - originally on BBC Radio 4 and available on the BBC Sounds app (in case any one else needs the info). It's a compelling series.
@@GodmanchesterGoblin Thanks for this info. I am now following the podcast and look forward to listening.
This is insane and reminded me of our RoboDebt scandal - which I'm sure is on your list. You did a fantastic job here of comprehensively but succinctly covering this entire scandal.
The real villains are the courts and juries that convicted these people. Jurors today see it as their job to convict, unless the defendant affirmatively proves he didn't do it, which is the opposite of how it should be. I don't ever hear people say what I grew up hearing, which was that "it is better that 100 guilty men go free than that one innocent man go to prison." Jurors are more afraid of somehow being fooled by the defendant's lawyer, or of preventing their own government from putting away someone guilty, than they are of sending an innocent person to prison. We need to fix that. We need to have a lot more frustrated prosecutors and a lot fewer innocent people with their lives ruined.
This is incredible and astonishing at how so many lives were ruined I’ve never heard of this
Suddenly, from one day to another, hundreds of subpostmasters with no prior issues experience problems with their brand new and untested accounting software, and no one suspects the software? I guess there are too many suits at the top!
Terrifying this could happen and probably still happens in other industries
I was recommended this video by RUclips and I’m glad I clicked on it. What a great watch and you did an amazing job telling the story of these victims.
It’s a failure of the legal system that these people were wrongly convicted and Post Office Limited has not suffered any sort of meaningful consequences. The cognitive dissonance to applaud themselves and offer bonuses to their “work” in robbing people.
They ruined their own employees lives for the sake of chasing money down. Constantly acting in bad faith and negligence for decades.
How could this be? My god the corruption and injustice is astounding. So egregious so heartbraking.
Sounds like a lot of higher ups in the Post Office Limited should be spending the rest of their lives in jail after personally paying damages and taking responsibility for the coverup...
Agreed. It's infuriating.
Wow, this is shameful. These poor people deserved so much more. Post Office Ltd and Horizon needed people to do jail time. I’m just shaking my head.
Holy cow. What an unbelievably evil company!
This is despicable. I would have hired an independent expert programmer to go through the computer and testify with evidence in court that it was malfunctioning.
The subpostmasters could never afford such a thing, especially one that could go up against Post Office Ltd's opposing bevy of programming experts who would claim your guy's wrong, and an amateur.
@@getgot7461i would do it for free to them, i bet a lot of devs would do it.. this is just sad for real, i almost cried watching this video
Wow, amglimpse has done it again! Great job in shining a light on another obscure topic, in a thought provoking and concise manner. My sympathies for the families and victims of this outrageous act of corporate greed and willful negligence.
dont know how your channel is not massive yet, but youll get there very soon. great videos every time, and usually a story i havent already heard 40 times. keep up the great work
This channel is criminally underrated. Great work guys. Felt angry this entire video.
Wow, fantastic job on a topic i haven't seen elsewhere. A 1 or greater should be in front of that sub count
How does Post Office Limited have this much power? They seem to literally be above the law.
Big companies do this all the time. Police assume that they have experts and put effort into things.
Its owned by the crown, so yes
@@chibinya That's insane! ((looks at his own ridiculous fool-filled clown-show government)) Oh... never mind...
At that time it was Post Office Limited, now it is the medical fluid manufacturer Pfiz5r.
The Post Office was founded literally over 200 years before the police force. So they have a special charter to do their own policing and to bring their own prosecutions. It should have been changed long ago - I'm not sure that it ever has though.
It's stuff like this that just reinforces my belief that it's totally OK to unalive people who run companies like this.
Morally just. Unironically.
agreed.
Utterly evil.
It’s infuriating that NO ONE has ever been held accountable or had served justice for the lives they’ve destroyed because of this bug. The British are an absolute disgrace for allowing this to happen
Wow. Just.. wow. I don't even have words to express how disturbing this is.
To anyone with a few brain cells, it wouldn’t make sense that all of a sudden, thousands of good employees suddenly started stealing.
However, if you are responsible for introducing the computers , software and training, then you may be motivated to blame the users, then criminalise them. What baffles me is how the postmasters were charged, but now the truth is known, why have those responsible for this major mess not been charged for the harm they caused to thousands.
They're the clintons of the UK
Awesome, unique stories as usual. Keep up the great presentations. This one was jaw-dropping
Post Office should have heads roll and jailtime served for this.
How did I never hear about this ?? Absolute class work, keep it up 😊 can’t wait to see what you do next ❤
i will watch this when i get lunch ty so much amglimpse i wuv u
Never heard of this story, great video to bring light to it
Re Post Office Ltd:
I swear, these hybrid government/private chimeras seem susceptible to some of the most egregious corruption and abuse. (I’m thinking of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac here in the United States, whose corrupt cultures and naked greed were critical to the crash of 2008.)
100%
Consistently great videos. Please keep it up 👍
How did nobody notice the regularity? All of a sudden, discrepancies springing out of the woodwork, up and down the country, from seemingly unrelated branches? That warrants investigation, no matter who or how much.
The algorithm has blessed us! Great video and a new sub
I cannot remember the last time a story made me so violently angry. I am LIVID listening to this.
This should have raised alarms in the court systems, there were more than a handful of employees from the same company being charged with something similar, there's an obvious pattern to follow.
Wow, just wow! Great documentary, thank you.
This story is baffling. Thank you for telling it.
Amglimpse is almost at 50k subs, hell yea.... congrats
How is this nor criminal? There should be people going to jail over this
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The jails that they own?
Since money was missing, which post office limited officials were on the take and embezzling the funds?
“Privatize everything “ lol
Just had your channel suggested to me from the horse girl vid, to my delight I arrived for a new upload!
Me too 😂 I watch many horse videos
It isn't just Post Office Ltd. either. These auditors should have been fired for not being smart enough to connect the dots and the judges and prosecutors should be in prison for facilitating these false convictions.
But the prosecutor was the Post Office (not the Crown Prosecution Service). The police in these cases were also the Post Office (not the regular UK police forces). Yes, they should be in jail, but too many players were on the same side.
@@GodmanchesterGoblin Thank you for explaining that
As someone involved in software and computing, it is absolutely insane that bugs are treated so minorly. If a group of engineers designed a bridge so poorly that multiple people died from it, they'd very rightly be punished.
Absolutely sickening. Whoever was standing in the way of the recognition that these were sudden & very widespread needs to suffer what these good people did.
Not a bug, a feature.