Independence Day, Philippines

After the long silence here as well, and after putting my postcards blog back to life, it would be also fair to show some attention to this guy here before the year comes to an end... and I wanted to share a strange story here with you...


Few months ago I received this envelope from the Philippines with this really nice set of stamps issued in 2017 for their Independence Day.

the backside suggested that it is something for the official Postcrossing site. Even though I prefer written and stamped cards instead of ones sent in envelopes, sometimes people do this for really noble reasons and include something extra besides the usual postcard - the sender as you can see wants to swap covers too, which is why I thought he had decided to put the postcard in the envelope and grant me this really nice cover.

However, once I opened the envelope I was left with some confusion.

First of all the postcard was nowhere to be found (and the basic rule of Postcrossing is that one has to send you a postcard and you shouldnt register anything other than a postcard, not even a folded card).

The absence of postcard wasn't what was strange here, but it was the actual contents as you can see below...

Two envelopes from which the stamps had been removed and which according to the address is something the sender had received and sent them to me as covers supposedly.

I have never complained to the Postcrossing team before on something I had received but this time I really thought the situation called for it... not cos I want to nag them on what I had received but I just dont want to be the bad guy later and have complaints that I haven't registered something I had received.
They said they would look into it and message the sender and see what happens.
Few weeks later, I got their reply, which said that according to the sender, this is not what the person had sent me, but that they had actually sent me two nice covers since I was a collector and have claimed to have included a postcard as well. Being that no one here can prove what had actually happened (even though I can prove from my side 1000% what I had found in my mailbox), the final verdict was that someone had obviously tampered this envelope along the way. ?!?!

I honestly find that hard to believe, cos the envelope really seemed fine, and how would one know that there are envelopes inside so that they cut out the stamps - isn't it more sensible to simply take both envelopes without bothering with the stamp cutting and all? But then, who am I to claim  what had really happened and there is no point in that... at the end of the day, something that was supposed to be really nice, turned out into something really disappointing....

Have you experienced something like this before? Or what is the strangest mail story that has happened to you?
Feel free to share your story in the comments... if you are still visiting this blog after all my absence :)))