Why mail theft is on the rise

Watherine Venis no longer leaves letters in the mailbox near her home in Flushing, New York. Instead, she walks six blocks to a post office and deposits them there. She’s noticed that mail like birthday cards is increasingly not reaching her and says her neighbors say the same.

“A lot of people around here have lost mail,” she says of her Queens neighborhood, where Congresswoman Grace Meng recently pressured the U.S. Postal Service to launch an investigation. in the increase in mail theft.

Since the pandemic, mail theft has increased. There was an increase of 87% reports of large volume theft of mailboxes between 2019 and 2022, according to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. A Government Accountability Office report shows that the number of serious crime investigations investigated by the service nearly doubled between 2019 and 2023, from 609 cases to 1,198, an increase driven by a jump in mail carrier robberies.

What Venis fears most about mail theft is having his identity stolen and his personal account information used by criminals. These fears are not unfounded. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued an alert to financial institutions in February 2023, asking banks to be vigilant about check fraud schemes targeting the U.S. mail. In many cases, scammers accept checks, use chemicals to eliminate them, and then rewrite them for tens of thousands of dollars. If consumers do not inform their banks about fraud in a timely manner, they will not be able to get their money back. There were nearly 250,000 reports of suspicious activity around checks in 2021, the most recent year for which data was available, a 158% increase from 2014, according to the Treasury Department.

see more information: Defrauded? Banks may not return your money.

The Postal Service attributes the increase in theft to a few things: how easy it has become to commit financial crimes using information stolen through the mail, the general increase in fraud during the pandemic, and what it calls “loose prosecutorial climate”For property crimes. It launched Project Safe Delivery in 2023 in an effort to strengthen protections and launch technology and data to do more investigations.

But Edna Sepulveda thinks she has a better explanation for the cause of the problem. Sepulveda is a retired Postal Police Officer (PPO), part of a force responsible for preventing mail theft and protecting carriers. For 29 years, in Newark, NJ, Manhattan and Florida, she patrolled areas with high postal crime rates, watched mailboxes and arrested people stealing mail – sometimes while fishing for letters from blue collection boxes.

However, in 2020, the Postal Inspection Service told employees that PPOs could no longer work outside of Postal Service facilities, according to a 2023 lawsuit filed in D.C. District Court by the Postal Police Officers Union. The approximately 350 people who now work as OPPs can no longer do the type of work that Sepúlveda did; instead, they protect post office properties. This, according to Sepulveda and his union, the Postal Police Officers Association (PPOA), is part of what is driving the rise in mail theft. “As long as we’re there, we’re going to stop crime,” Sepulveda says. “Now criminals are not afraid.”

The policy represents a break with the way the Postal Service has conducted security for two decades. Starting in the 2000s, the Postal Inspection Service decided that having PPOs on premises was not the best use of resources and began deploying them on the street, according to Frank Albergo, president of the PPOA. PPOs targeted zip codes where mail theft was prevalent. The idea was to prevent crime in the first place, says Albergo, rather than to capture people, investigate them and arrest them.

See more information: How loan facility can lead to fraud.

The new policy has prompted two lawsuits, a congressional bill to reverse the policy, as well as calls from postal officials to restore the police. “We cannot allow these types of attacks on carriers and other postal workers to continue,” Ivan D. Butts, president of the National Association of Postal Supervisors, said in a statement. such an appeal. “Increased PPO surveillance and patrolling is needed in high-risk neighborhoods, especially along routes that carriers cover.” The number of OPPs has decreased from 425 in 2020 and from 3,000 in the 1980s.

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service told TIME that PPOs are assigned to specific facilities to protect those facilities, and that the Postal Inspection Service has determined that those facilities require a “high level of security.” Removing police officers from these facilities would put employees and customers at risk, the organization said. Additionally, the Postal Inspection Service deploys postal inspectors to investigate and prevent crimes such as mail theft – they are like detectives to the PPO beat officer.

The reassignment of PPOs is correlated with a decrease in arrests and convictions for mail theft and an increase in mail carrier robberies. Whether this is the cause of these changes is up for debate. A May 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office shows that theft, theft, and assault crimes off USPS property are increasing, reaching 707 in 2023, while crimes on USPS property fell slightly between 2022 and 2023.

The GAO report also concluded that the U.S. Postal Inspection Service did not fully document its processes for determining the size and location of its postal inspectors and OPP. The Inspection Service has not assessed the size and location of its workforce since 2011, the report concluded, adding that “it is unclear how long the Inspection Service will rely on outdated information to determine how to align its force of the postal police with current security needs. ”

Banks and customers are struggling to deal with the fraud that often follows mail theft. Irv Acklesburg, an attorney who lives in Philadelphia, says his credit card company recently called to ask if he had used a new credit card to buy gas and withdraw cash. He did not have; It turned out that the credit card had been stolen on its way to him. A postal inspector followed up to find out more, he says. He hasn’t lost any money, but he knows people might: Two of his clients had an $84 check stolen in the mail, changed to $45,000 and cashed. They still haven’t gotten their money back.