Postman Swipes 2,200 Gamefly Games

A Philadelphia-area postal worker with sticky fingers has admitted to intercepting $86,000 worth of games originally intended for subscribers of GameFly's video game rental service.

If you live in the Philadelphia area and had trouble receiving your GameFly rentals last year, odds are good that Reginald Johnson was to blame. Johnson worked as a mail-processing clerk at the U.S. Postal Service processing and distribution center in Philadelphia, responsible for unloading mail from the trucks that docked there. And unload he did...he just unloaded quite a lot into his own SUV.

Reports of missing GameFly shipments in the area began reaching the Postal Service's Office of Inspector General in 2007. In September of 2008, the inspector general set up a sting operation using test mailings, and Johnson was found to be the culprit. After a car chase that ended in Johnson crashing his car and fleeing on foot, authorities discovered 79 GameFly mailings in a backpack in the vehicle, with an additional 81 found in a duffel bag dropped during the pursuit.

And what was Johnson doing with all of these rental games? In his SUV authorities also discovered five Nintendo Wii Sports, three Wii Fits, a Playstation console, game controllers, and receipts from GameStop, where Johnson had been exchanging games for trade-in credit.

Johnson admitted to stealing 2,200 GameFly mailings over the course of his employment with the U.S. Postal Service in federal district court yesterday, and now faces between 12 to 18 months in prison according to preliminary sentencing guidelines. Sentencing is scheduled for January 13th.

I'm actually interested to know which GameStop he was bringing these games to. A guy showing up on a regular basis with a stack of caseless game discs had to have thrown up some sort of red flag, shouldn't it?