I had never heard or thought of using sticky rat traps on a string to pilfer mail from the large blue boxes. I did have a check pilfered from my mailbox which was fraudlently cashed. As a result I use the free online service my bank offers to send checks.



It was around noon on April 12.

Josefina Gomez Pando, 83, dropped a check for $112 into a blue mailbox on a corner on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Then she proceeded to her doctor's appointment.

Her check would never make it to the mailman.

That's because someone else, most likely using a sticky rat trap attached to the end of a string, fished her check right back out of that mailbox.

And then they wrote a new one for $3,500.

"I pay all my bills by mail  —  around 30 checks a month," said Pando, who owns three buildings in New York City. "This never happened to me."

Mailboxes increasingly are a target for criminals
"Mail fishing" is when people use tools to retrieve envelopes out of the blue mailboxes lining the streets, and it's on the rise, according to law enforcement officials.

"It's doubled over the last two years, at least," said Lt. John Grimpel, a spokesman for the New York City Police Department.

Mail fishers are not unique to Manhattan either. Mail is under siege in Texas, Florida, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Colorado and California, among other places.

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"It's coast to coast," Grimpel said.

The increase in mail fishing can be blamed in part on how the world is growing more complicated, said R. Sean McCleskey, a retired United States Secret Service agent who supervised an identity theft task force for more than a decade.

"Always when I make my signature, I make a line under my name, and this signature that has been falsified has no line."
-Josefina Gomez Pando, a victim of mail fishing
"The more companies are hardening up their policies on their cybersecurity, [criminals] might say 'I don't have the skill level to break into a computer now, but I can sure as heck go to the mailbox,'" McCleskey said.

Even as more communications and payments play out on screens, nearly 150 billion pieces of mail were sent out in the United States in 2017.

Trying to find recourse
Two days after Pando left her check in the mailbox, she received a call from Citibank. "They said they need to talk with me," Pando said.

She stopped by her nearest branch, where she was told she might have been a victim of fraud. When she saw the check, she was taken aback. "It was very good writing and it was very professional writing," Pando said.

Managing analog ID theft risks Managing analog ID theft risks
2:35 PM ET Fri, 4 May 2018 | 01:17
But the signature on the check was clearly not hers. "Always when I make my signature, I make a line under my name," she said. "And this signature that has been falsified has no line."

The bank did not allow Pando's check to clear.

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"At Citibank, we take check fraud very seriously and we maintain regular contact with local police as part of our aggressive strategy to combat all types of fraud," said Drew Benson, a spokesman for the company.

Paul Benda, senior vice president of risk management policy at the American Bankers Association, said it's seeing an uptick in mail fishing but that banks deploy sophisticated algorithms to detect such suspicious transactions.

"There's really a comprehensive system to stop this fraud," Benda said.

Donna Harris, a spokeswoman for the New York division of the United States Postal Inspection Service  —  the Postal Service's law enforcement division  — declined to comment on the dollar amount stolen each year through the mail.

Someone breaking into your mail, just as bad as a computer
So how do these people break into the boxes?

Unless your arm is plastic, you can't get your hand in the mailbox, said Grimpel of the NYPD, adding that they usually send those rectangular sticky traps that people use to catch rodents down the mailbox slots, with a string.

They can pull up 20 envelopes at a time this way, he said.

Mail fishers have other techniques, as well.

"I've seen more traps that I can tell you," said McCleskey. "I've seen them roll up and put a chain around the mailbox and drag it down the street."

While not all endeavors to steal mail are fruitful  —  "every time you go fishing," Grimpel said, "you don't catch a fish"  —  plenty of times, they are.


Criminals can get their hands on people's gift cards, cash-filled birthday greetings, rent checks, money orders, credit cards or documents with home addresses and Social Security numbers.

"You can basically build a profile of an individual from the information you gather in the mail," McCleskey said.

And as was done to Pando, thieves can "wash" a person's check of ink with easy-to-buy chemicals. Then they have a blank check with which to do whatever they want.

Trust in the mail takes a hit
Mail theft is a federal crime, and can land someone in prison for up to five years.

The police have been trying to catch these thieves, by hiding cameras near the blue boxes and staking them out in the middle of the night when the criminals most often go fishing.

"If they observe them sticking a glue trap down the mailbox, that's probable cause they're not mailing a letter," the NYPD's Grimpel said.

The United States Postal Inspection Service is also on the case.

"This is a bad thing because many people depend on the mail. "
-Josefina Gomez Pando, a victim of mail fishing
"We are investigating these crimes and we will arrest these individuals and bring them to justice," Harris said.

She said they're also replacing and retrofitting mailboxes to make them fishing-resistant.

"Crime trends change and you have to change with them to maintain your relevancy," Harris said.

Since her bad experience, Pando hasn't been back to a mailbox. She's doesn't even send letters to her family members in Spain anymore.

"This is a bad thing because many people depend on the mail," she said.

How to keep your mail safe:

Deposit your mail before the last collection time, said Harris. This will prevent your mail from sitting in the box overnight, she said, when mail fishers most often come out. (On most mailboxes, you'll see a list of the pick-up times).

McCleskey took it a step further.

"Take your mail and put it in the post office, and when I say in the post office, I mean walk in and put it in, which is kind of a pain but I've seen mail stolen directly out of the receptacles outside as well," he said.

Consider requesting a number for your mail and following it, he added.

"I would highly recommend tracking your mail right now," he said.

The New York City Police Department recommends using a pen with pigmented (permanent) ink to write checks out, as it's harder to wash away.

You also want to check your account balance frequently to make sure your checks were cleared by the establishments that you wrote them to, according to the NYPD. Contact your bank as soon as you realize something is amiss.

Harris said people should also call the United States Postal Inspection Service at 877-876-2455, so it can investigate.

"If they see someone committing a crime against the blue box, call 911 immediately," said Harris.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/2...laging-mailboxes.htm

Good advice.

I only use a PO Box for relevant mail and I do indeed hand walk any outbound mail into the Post Office.

Forgeries are the banks problem. If they pay a check with a forged signature, or forged endorsement, that's their loss.

Each bank has an amount below which they don’t even check.

I had a $2400 business check sent to a supplier stolen out of my mailbox and the thief forged/changed the check to pay to someone I never knew. It was paid and cashed even though obviously a modified check. Suntrust bank gave me the money back, but it took 3 weeks. I have been taking important/valuable shipments and mail directly to the post office for a couple of years.....

I had my outgoing mail stolen several years ago. Thieves bought blank check stock from Staples and made checks with my account number and their name.

I'm kind of glad it happened. Forced us to use Bill Pay through our bank. We went form buying stamps every 2 months or so to never buying stamps.

I think the only checks we write now are to the PTA. Everything else is paid via Bill Pay.

In my neighborhood, they were opening up the community mail boxes directly.

It got to be so regular, they would make people pick up their letters at the post office.

They'd replace the boxes, then it would happen again.

Finally, I think they figured out how the thieves were breaking in and addressed that. Part of the community boxes was a bigger compartment with a slot that people could drop the mail they were mailing out. Well, this compartment also had the lock to the whole box that the carrier would unlock to get to the whole community box so they can put in people's letters. The thieves were fishing through the slot to open the lock mechanism from inside. Doh.

They finally put in boxes with the slots blocked. So now people have to go elsewhere to drop off their mail to be sent.

I would be nice if they actually did something when they catch a mail thief.

We had a neighbor with dimentia stealing mail a little over a year ago. She took mail from homes that had brown garage doors, just like her house. Luckily she threw it all into a pile in her closet, unopened. People actually thought the Postal Inspectors would put her in prison.

quote:

Originally posted by Colby Bruce:
We had a neighbor with dimentia stealing mail a little over a year ago. She took mail from homes that had brown garage doors, just like her house. Luckily she threw it all into a pile in her closet, unopened. People actually thought the Postal Inspectors would put her in prison.

I was told by the postal inspectors, that once the mail reaches your mailbox and is stolen, it becomes an issue for the local Sheriff to investigate.

I assume that's true? or were they just trying to pass the buck to the Sheriff?

I spent thirty years with the USPS and never saw local authorities called for postal theft. Things could of changed, what with the high volume of package theft now-a-days, but I doubt it.

quote:

Originally posted by radioman:
I was told by the postal inspectors, that once the mail reaches your mailbox and is stolen, it becomes an issue for the local Sheriff to investigate.

I assume that's true? or were they just trying to pass the buck to the Sheriff?

Once the USPO delivers the mail/package it's out of their hands.

I was told it was a Federal crime to pick up my neighbors mail while they were on vacation.
The lady delivering mail on our road said she would report me if I did it again.

quote:

The lady delivering mail on our road said she would report me if I did it again.

The carrier from Hell. Follows all the rules. I have met them. In her spare time she probably fantasizes about catching people whose mailbox is one inch taller than regulation. If your lawn guy left a receipt in your mailbox without a stamp that would be a major crime. Technically, the post office will hold the mail while you are out of town. Of course that requires standing in long line to fill out the forms and another line to pick up the mail. If you complain about her prepare to have problems getting YOUR mail.

I'd have to hazard a guess that these people mailbox fishing, are NOT the same people formally hacking computers.

At my office they just use a car jack to pry the outgoing box open.

quote:

I'd have to hazard a guess that these people mailbox fishing, are NOT the same people formally hacking computers.

In my area it is a criminal that enlists people at homeless camps to pilfer the boxes.
Payment in wine etc. Local cops finally got the guy.

When we kept having customers reporting that they never received debit cards that were sent to them, they finally caught this guy:
http://www.wkyt.com/content/ne...theft-406715105.html