Protective measures can help stamp out mail theft

Susan Avery of Vermont was in Albuquerque visiting her 92-year-old mother last month when she discovered a thief had stolen two of her mother’s checks from the curbside mailbox and rewritten them.

Her mother, who lives in the Northeast Heights and manages her own affairs, was nearly out more than $1,400.

Mail theft is a big thing right now, particularly since it’s tax season and scammers are trying to steal W-2 forms and other documents in hopes of stealing someone’s identity.

Bernalillo County sheriff’s deputies report that smash-andgrab burglars have been hitting individual and cluster mailboxes and that two mail carriers were threatened before entire bags were stolen from their trucks.

In Avery’s mother’s case, the thief had “washed” the two checks taken from her mailbox so that they were made out to a common name like “John Smith” (Avery didn’t want to be more specific). The amounts were changed to $750 in one case and $700 in the other.

Avery thwarted the thief by alerting her mother’s credit union, which reimbursed the money and acted quickly to close the old account and open a new one with new checks. Lesson learned. Of course, you can avoid this kind of heartache by reducing or eliminating your use of checks. Whereas checkbooks were once the standard way to pay bills, now many people pay online through their bank.

“The danger of personal checks is that one single check can contain a person’s whole financial story on it,” said the website gobankingrates. com. “Checks usually display a person’s name, address, bank name, checking account routing number and account number. With this information, anyone can take over your account or purchase items with your money.”

If you must use checks, keep in mind a few simple tips. The first is to sideline your ball-point pen — at least when check-writing. Gel, or uni-ball pens, are specially designed to bleed into paper so that the ink can’t be washed away by chemicals, according to gobankingrates.com.

Also, don’t leave outgoing envelopes in your mailbox. Putting up that little red flag is, well, a red flag when it comes to mail-mongers. If you can, take your mail to a post office or mailing outlet store or even your workplace. A few other suggestions:

If you have to leave outgoing mail in your box, do so immediately before the carrier usually comes, and don’t raise the flag.

Shred or burn canceled checks. If you need to save them, store them in a secured area, such as a bank lock box. Don’t throw them in the trash.

Before you buy checks from mail- order companies, find out whether and what kind of security measures have been taken. For example, visible and hidden characteristics can be added to discourage counterfeiting.

Mea culpa. In my last column about dealing with a computer that has been locked by scammers, I gave the wrong instructions on getting to “task master” so you can shut down a particular program. For this to work, you must hit the “ctrl,” “alt” and “del” keys simultaneously.