Planning agency falls victim to the old shoe-in-the-mailbox trick
I spent all day yesterday shoe-fishing, and nothing to show for it but an empty string and a sticky boot.
This is how I know the Palm Beach County Transportation Planning Agency is writing fewer checks.
And the TPA has quite the checkbook: It prioritizes distribution of more than $600 million for transportation projects.
Turns out, it is also a prolific user of stamps.
The public agency cut five checks to vendors totaling $78,000 and dropped them into a Datura Street downtown mailbox. Thieves promptly fished them out.
You might wonder why the TPA is paying five-figure business bills with checks and not, say, wire transfers. Or credit cards. Or something a wee bit more 21st century.
“The modern era of paying by internet is not safe either,” TPA attorney Paul Gougelman told
Stet, a local newsletter to which I contribute.
Well. Who wants to break that big bad news to the National Automated Clearing House Association and its money-moving Automatic Clearinghouse network?
ACH processed 30 billion electronic payments in 2022, including direct payroll deposits and Social Security benefits. If the average transfer was $100, just that portion of electronic banking is firmly in trillion-dollar territory.
Entire banks are built on digital platforms.
But enough with the big fish. Let’s get straight to the baiting and the hooking.
This was not a smash and grab. The United States Postal Service told the transportation agency that it was possible the thieves took an old shoe “or similar object” and attached it to the end of a string. The string would be coated with something sticky.
The shoe is lowered into the mailbox. The letters attach to the string. The culprit reels them in.
And they say American ingenuity is dead.
Then it’s on to the laundromat, which may be as small as a bottle of nail polish remover. The writing on the check is erased and replaced with a name, and an amount — a much larger amount — suitable for cashing.
By the way, I have no compunction identifying the location of the Datura Street mailbox fishing expedition. Astute thieves will not return to the scene of the crime. They will simply do a dry-land version of what my daddy did: Drag us all out of bed Sunday dawn to go looking for a more promising fishing hole than the one he dragged us all out of bed to find on Saturday morning.
Nor am I especially concerned that a reader of this column in Tallahassee, or, perhaps, in a mansion across the Intracoastal from where I am writing this, is going to consider the breached mailbox and the sticky string and the shoe and think: This would make a great cable news/political resume soundbite that could eventually make voting by mail in Florida even harder than it is now.
Sorry, Mr. D’Souza, Heritage Foundation, Concerned Conspiracy Theorists of America, et al. Would-be election fraudsters could fish ballots out of mailboxes all day long and still come up empty. Unlike certain letters stuffed with money, a Florida voter can track the progress of their mailed ballot to see if it actually makes it to the Supervisor of Elections. They do this online.
See how safety is built into a digital platform, TPA?
Yes, we know there are security breaches in online banking. We know about them because, unlike the guys with the strings and the dreams, banks tell us when it happens.
Sometimes, all it takes is one odd transaction for a bank to ping one’s email and ask: “Did you really mean to do this?”
And almost always, if five checks completely wipe out your operating account, as happened with the TSA, a bank algorithm will sit up a little straighter and ask: “DID YOU REALLY MEAN TO DO THIS?”
Honestly, I like the U.S. mail. I wave at the friendly postal truck driver every time she picks up my own mailed checks.
But then, I also know that anyone who fished my $14.99 newspaper subscription payment out of a mailbox would do what one does with a minnow and throw it right back.
Just as long as TPA keeps mailing fat checks, there will be plenty more fish in the sea.