Marion man sentenced to 3 years for forging postage meter stamps for internet biz

CEDAR RAPIDS — Operating out of a bedroom of a Marion house, Bradley Jon Matheny ran such a bustling business on eBay that he showed up almost every weeknight at the Cedar Rapids post office with a big pile of packages to mail to customers.

His arrival about 8 p.m. each night at the loading dock left postal employees with little time with shipping deadlines to scrutinize his packages. When he refused admonitions to arrive earlier and allow more time, postal employees grew suspicious, court records show.

Now Matheny, 43, will spend three years in federal prison, a sentence handed down last week after a jury earlier found him guilty of cheating the post office out more than a quarter-million dollars worth of postage and making false statements on customs forms for overseas shipments.

Following a one-day trial, a jury in March found Matheny guilty of seven counts of postage meter stamp forgery and counterfeiting, and three counts of export violations.

Evidence at trial and sentencing showed that Matheny operated an eBay business known as “Mathenys” from a Marion home. He sold retail goods to individuals all over the United States and around the world and used the U.S. Postal Service to ship goods to customers.

Prosecutors said that in 2015, Matheny shipped over 28,000 packages through USPS. So postage was a significant cost to his business. To increase his profit, jurors found, Matheny used forged and counterfeited postage stamps on many of the packages he sent to his customers between 2013 and 2017.

In 2015, employees at the Cedar Rapids Main Post Office became suspicious of Matheny’s mailing practices after he continued to drop off packages late in the evening. Postal officials eventually contacted federal law enforcement, specifically the United States Postal Inspection Service, and reported that Matheny might be falsifying postage in connection with his eBay business.

A review of Matheny’s packages in late 2015 revealed that most of those packages had either insufficient postage or a forged or counterfeited postage meter stamp. Similar reviews in 2016 and 2017 showed similar results.

In 2017, law enforcement obtained a federal search warrant at Matheny’s residence, a single-family house in Marion, and seized a large number of unusual paper clippings of partial Priority Mail and First Class postage meter stamps, as well as a handwritten list of “crossed-out” Priority Mail tracking numbers.

Law enforcement, who imaged Matheny’s electronic devices, found on his computer a number of the unaltered electronic versions of the forged postage meter stamps in question. Later, working with representatives of eBay, law enforcement learned that Matheny was taking advantage of vulnerabilities in the Postal Service’s electronic payment systems to receive Priority Mail treatment for his packages even though he had paid only the First Class rate.

During sentencing Friday, a postal inspector testified that the face value of the counterfeited and forged postage that Matheny manufactured between 2013 and 2017 was more than $380,000.

Some of Matheny’s customers lived overseas, including in Russia, Israel, New Zealand and South Africa, according to court documents, and the Postal Service required Matheny to make truthful statements on these exports to other countries. Matheny was required to declare whether the package contained merchandise or a gift, and also the value of the contents.

Matheny falsely certified on these forms that his packages each contained a “gift” worth a nominal sum such as “$1.90.” He knew the packages were not gifts and worth more than what he listed on the forms, but this allowed his packages to clear foreign customs more rapidly and possibly avoid foreign customs taxes.

U.S. District Judge C.J. Williams also fined Matheny $10,000 and ordered him to pay $256,442 in restitution to USPS. He must also serve three years of supervised release following his prison term.

This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy L. Vavricek and investigated by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.

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