A couple claim they had to give up their lives in Spain after a postal bungle meant their passports ended up in NEW YORK.
Keith Kerslake, 53, and his wife Louise applied for the essential documents in May last year, so they could carry on working.
But just last week the couple were shocked to find an unread message on social media that said the documents had landed 3,000 miles in the USA.
Sadly, by the time they found out, they had already had to leave their jobs – and the country they had lived in for nine years – because they were unable to work without the paperwork.
Now the couple from Hull, East Yorks., say they feel “sceptical” about using the Royal Mail after their passports ended up on the other side of the Atlantic.
The Kerslake’s were living in the Fuengirola area of Spain and working in Gibraltar when they applied to renew their passports so they could carry on with their jobs in security and a law firm respectively.
Their passports were sent by the passport office to Mr Kerslake’s father in Hull, who then sent them via a Royal Mail tracker service to Spain.
But they somehow ended up on the east coast of America.
Mr Kerslake, who says he could no longer work in his security job because the passport did not arrive, said: “We just couldn’t believe that our identifications had been sent to a stranger on the other side of the world.
“We had to move back to the UK because we couldn’t work in Spain without our passports.
“We waited and waited after my dad told us he had sent the passports onto us, but they never arrived. We had to wait more than a month for a new pair to be issued, but by then, we were scraping by with bar jobs.”
The couple say they contacted the Royal Mail complaints department “more than a dozen times”, and were told the passports were still at Heathrow, and then later were told they had arrived in Madrid.
Eventually, Mr Kerslake claims Royal Mail told him the passports had been lost in transit, and he was offered £40 towards the cost of new ones.
“We came back to the UK to find work and it wasn’t until last week we found out the first set of passports had actually gone to someone in New York.”
Then, just last week, Mr Kerslake and his wife found a Facebook message from May, 4, 2015, in their “other” folder, which they had not been notified of and so they had not seen it.
The message was from a man in New York, who told them their passports had been sent to them and that he had handed them in to the UK Consulate in New York.
“The passports are now void but that is beside the point,” said Mr Kerslake.