Condo owners want answers about Canada Post theft
Mail fraud victims want to know why Canada Post mum
When a mail carrier was assaulted in November, a key to a condo building mailbox was stolen by his assailant. Katherine Wilton reports residents of the building in Notre-Damede-Grâce who have been victims of identity theft want to know why they weren’t notified about the missing key.
Several Notre-Dame-deGrâce residents who have been the victims of mail fraud and identity theft are wondering why Canada Post failed to notify them that a key to their condo building and mail slots was stolen when their postal carrier was assaulted and robbed in November.
A woman who lives in the condo said she knew there was something amiss when she received a $4,000 MasterCard bill from the Bank of Montreal in January. The woman doesn’t have an account with the Bank of Montreal and never applied for a MasterCard.
When she posted her story on her Facebook page, she learned that two other residents in her condo building and six Facebook friends who live on Grand Blvd., had also received statements for credit cards that they had not applied for.
The woman, who didn’t want her name published to protect her privacy, soon discovered that her HydroQuébec, Vidéotron and Visa bills were missing from her mailbox.
Fraudsters who had access to the postal carrier’s stolen keys began stealing mail last November and continued until Canada Post changed the locks in the condo building in February, said Catherine Schmitt, president of the condo association’s board.
Schmitt said the fraudsters applied for several types of credit cards and then returned to the condo to steal the cards after they had been delivered.
“People were getting state- ments saying they had applied for credit cards and were getting phone calls from credit card companies,” Schmitt said. “One person lost a passport and someone else got a $7,000 bill.”
Schmitt contacted The Gazette after reading that Canada Post had sent a letter to 900 customers in Ahuntsic asking them to be on the lookout for signs of identity theft after an employee was fired for alleged mail theft.
Canada Post spokesperson Anik Losier told The Gazette on Tuesday that the company alerts customers as soon as an incident is reported.
But Schmitt said Canada Post never notified members of her condo association about the theft of the keys.
Losier told The Gazette on Wednesday that residents were not notified that their letter carrier was robbed last fall because “we had no reason to believe there was any immediate threat to the mail.”
She said the locks were changed on the grey relay boxes where the mail is stored, but they only changed the locks at the condo after customers called them in February to report the identity theft.
Canada Post is “reviewing the incident and related operational processes,” Losier said in an email.
Schmitt said it took condo residents a few months to realize that several of them were the victims of mail fraud and identity theft.
“Whoever had the key was very happily visiting our building from the end of November until we finally figured it out in the third week of February,” she said.
Schmitt said a Canada Post employee told her that the stolen key accesses several mail slots in apartment buildings on the carrier’s route in N.D.G.
The condo owner who received the MasterCard bill said she recalled seeing a man who looked like a postal carrier hanging around the mail slots around 7 p.m. one evening. Their mail is usually delivered between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m.
“I mentioned to him that he was working late and he said, ‘Yes,’ ” she recalled. “He was definitely handling the mail.”
The woman said she is speaking out because she wants “the whole community” to be on guard against mail fraud. “People need to know about this,” she said.
She said she reported the fraud to officers at police Station 11 in N.D.G., but they didn’t seem very interested in investigating.
“They said: ‘It’s the crime of the century, but we don’t do anything about it,’ ” she recalled.