No. 21-3712 ___________________________

United States of America

Plaintiff - Appellee

v.

Bradley Jon Matheny

Defendant - Appellant ____________

Appeal from United States District Court for the Northern District of Iowa - Cedar Rapids ____________

Submitted: June 17, 2022 Filed: July 28, 2022 ____________ Before GRUENDER, BENTON, and GRASZ, Circuit Judges. ____________ GRUENDER, Circuit Judge.

Bradley Matheny was convicted on seven counts of forging or counterfeiting postage meter stamps in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 501 and three counts of smuggling in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 554. The district court sentenced Matheny to 36 months’ imprisonment and ordered him to pay $256,441.78 in restitution to the United States Postal Service (“USPS”). Matheny appeals, challenging the sufficiency of the evidence supporting his convictions, the district court’s estimate of the face value of the counterfeit stamps for purposes of calculating his advisory sentencing guidelines range, the amount of restitution ordered, and the substantive reasonableness of his prison sentence. We vacate and remand on the restitution issue but otherwise affirm Matheny’s convictions and sentence.

I.

Matheny operated an online business buying and reselling items on eBay. He used the USPS to ship items to customers. Through eBay’s web site, Matheny would input his package specifications, prepay postage, and receive a digital shipping label that he would print on adhesive paper. The top of the label indicated whether he had paid for first-class or priority shipping; the bottom of the label included a barcode and tracking number.

During the summer of 2015, a Cedar Rapids post-office manager noticed that Matheny was regularly dropping off packages at the back dock after 8:00 p.m., which was the “critical entry time” when the office staff “need[ed] to get the packages in so that [they could] process them properly for their next location.” The manager asked Matheny “if he could possibly bring his mail in earlier,” noting that the office was “doing him a courtesy by letting him come to the back dock” in the first place. Matheny replied, “Well, I can’t do that. Do I have to take my business somewhere else?” The manager relented and assured Matheny that the office “appreciate[d his] business.”

After that conversation, Matheny began dropping off his packages progressively later, “until routinely he was coming in about a quarter to 9:00.” As a result, the staff “didn’t have . . . time to scrutinize the packages.” They would simply sort the packages for priority or first-class delivery according to the designation of shipping class at the top of the label.

In the fall of 2015, a mail handler approached the manager with “some parcels that she said didn’t look right”—“the postage didn’t seem to match up with the service they were getting.” After investigating the packages himself, the manager referred the matter to Inspector Ron Jewell of the Postal Inspection Service. -2- Inspector Jewell intercepted and examined every piece of mail that Matheny sent over a one-month period and discovered several irregularities. Some packages had been “underweighted”; that is, the recorded weight on the label, which determined the postage fee, was less than the actual weight of the package. Other packages exhibited recorded weights that been altered. In some cases, a package had both been underweighted and