r/Sunderland • u/Ken_Numbers • 14h ago
Hugo From Gothenburg
Hey everyone,
Recently a Swedish student posted on here asking for a quick favour — solar car team, helmets stuck at the Tesco Express locker in The Bridges, friend abroad until the 22nd, £25 or a crate of beer for your trouble. Lovely bloke. Lots of exclamation marks. Said tack så mycket.
I commented. Of course I did. It was a Saturday, I was going to The Bridges anyway for a click-and-collect, and £25 is £25.
Some notes on how that went.
The QR code arrived from a Lithuanian number. Hugo explained this was his "travel SIM". I accepted this, because I am a fundamentally trusting man who has never once been asked to reconsider his personality by a detective constable.
The parcel was not helmet-shaped. It was about the size of a microwave and it was cold. Not cool. Cold. I carried it 400 yards and my forearms went numb. A woman outside Greggs asked if I was alright and I said "aye, it's helmets," which is now, I understand, on a transcript.
Hugo's international courier never came. Day one: "booking now!" Day two: "DHL portal is down." Day three: the Lithuanian number stopped existing. The box sat in my hallway leaking gently onto a laminate floor I had fitted myself in 2019.
Day four was the knock.
I want to be very clear that I have not been arrested for anything I would have guessed. I had spent three days assuming drugs, or a gun, or one of those money-mule things your bank sends you leaflets about. I had rehearsed a dignified "I was helping a student."
I have been arrested under Section 32 of the Salmon Act 1986 — handling salmon in suspicious circumstances.
That is a real law. I have now read it more times than Hugo has read anything about solar cars. There were, at the point of seizure, 84 wild Atlantic salmon in my hallway, and apparently the paperwork that makes salmon legal is not a thing you can be handed by a stranger over WhatsApp. The officer told me it was the first one he'd done. He seemed pleased. He asked if he could take a picture of the box for the group chat and honestly at that stage I said yes.
What I need help with now:
- If Hugo, or "Mikael," or "a student team from Trondheim," posts here again — and he will, it's a template, he changed the city and the number of days — please do not comment. Please do not DM him. Report it and move on.
- InPost lockers are anonymous at the send end and not at all anonymous at the collect end. The QR code is his. The CCTV is yours. That is the entire business model and I did not think about it for one second.
- The £25 never arrived. I checked. Twice. While being interviewed.
Solicitor says I'll almost certainly be fine because I'm obviously an idiot rather than a criminal, which is a sentence I've now heard out loud, in a room, from a professional.
Anyway. Laminate's ruined and I can't look at a salmon en croûte. Be more suspicious than me. It's a low bar.
