Is your mail safe? College professor says maybe not
The recently ended Christmas season was a good time for mail thieves. Grandma put a card containing cash, a check or a gift card in the mail and it never arrived, for instance. But all year long is good, too. Throughout the year, rent and utility checks go missing, orders for merchandise disappear. Your check is cashed but not for the amount you wrote on it and not by the person you wrote it to.
One Walker County employee says he’s had trouble with stolen or mysteriously disappearing mail three times recently.
A criminal justice and criminology professor at Georgia State University knows a lot about such issues. David Maimon is director of the Evidence-based Cybersecurity Research Group at GSU Andrew Young School of Policy Studies.
Maimon’s group has been studying mail theft; the research is showing at least 2,000 checks a week stolen and much more mail ending up in trash cans and ditches. The results have been making the news, including a piece in Postal Times.
There seems to be no end to the ways thieves find to steal money, merchandise and identities.
First, there’s the pretty straight-forward and smalltime criminal who walks up to people’s mail boxes and porches and takes what he or she wants.
There are a number of ways to protect yourself against this simple theft. Know when your mail usually arrives and be there to greet it. Ask neighbors to keep an eye out. Have packages mailed to a relative or friend who will be home. Aim security
cameras toward your mailbox or porch. Rent a post office box. Use delivery lockbox locations for packages.
Sadly, some thieves work for the post office, says Maimon’s research group. They steal mail themselves or work with outside thieves to help them. This is a level of theft harder to battle.
And then there are brazen thieves operating on a big scale. These people steal or buy stolen “arrow keys.” Arrow keys belong to the post office and have an arrow engraved on them. They are universal keys that can open postal service drop boxes — those blue boxes that sit along curbs as a convenient way for people to mail items. In cities, it’s not unusual for businesses to dump a considerable amount of mail in drop boxes each day. Some of that mail may be addressed to you.
Arrow keys have been stolen from mail carriers as they serve their routes and at postal facilities, and says the research, can be sold online for up to $7,000.
New methods of washing checks clean of handwriting make them reusable. Small time thieves write themselves checks and big shots bundle the freshly laundered checks and sell them for reuse and for identity theft.
In the process of all this theft, other important mail is lost — birthday, anniversary and sympathy cards, invitations, new baby announcements, letters, notifications, legal papers, newspapers, magazines, advertising and, yes, ballots.
So what is a person to do? Our Walker County resident signed up for a free service from the post office called Informed Delivery. He receives photo images of the mail he should be receiving each day. It doesn’t prevent theft, but it does alert him to problems.
The post office advises that people not use drop boxes after pick-up hours or on non-pickup days. It’s better to mail items in inside where drop slots are in walls.
Consider a post office box and other more secure options, pay bills online or by phone (though that comes with its own problems). Always brainstorm and ask yourself if there’s a better way.
Finally, don’t take missing mail lightly. Lost money is usually not recoverable and a stolen identity can take years to recover from.
More Information To report missing mail, visit https:// www.usps.com/help/missing-mail.htm To report suspected identity theft, visit https://www.identitytheft.