For Postal Thieves, Your Mailbox Is a Mother Lode

It used to be that crooks robbed banks because, as bandit Willie Sutton once said, that’s where the money was.

Now the thieves are going after your mailbox. Because these days, that’s where they’re finding the easy loot.

Thanks in part to an unsuspecting American populace, the U.S. mail has become one of the richest veins for crooks to mine. And federal authorities are scrambling to keep up, especially in Los Angeles, where a wide variety of audacious criminals have made mail theft a full-time occupation.

“It is probably the No. 1 type of white-collar crime in the country today,” said Postal Inspector Robert Bethel, chief spokesman for the criminal investigative arm of the U.S. Postal Service in Washington, D.C.

“You can be victimized and not know you’re being victimized for many months,” Bethel said. “Then the hammer falls. And it can take years to clear things up.”

Last week, the pervasiveness of mail theft was underscored once again when 11 Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department employees were accused of conspiring with postal workers to use credit cards stolen from the mail in a wide-ranging scam.

But they’re far from alone. Everyone’s getting in on the scam, from speed freaks driving around at 4 in the morning, fishing letters out of personal mailboxes, to organized professionals who go for volume, stealing loads of mail on days when government assistance checks and bills are circulating. Then there are the inside jobs by postal workers themselves.

They’re looking for checks, credit cards, bank account numbers and other financial information used to steal people’s identities.

One reason mail theft is so alarming, authorities say, is that it takes only one stolen item--an outgoing bill, an incoming checking account statement--to give a thief the information he needs to be off and spending.

Stealing mail is also becoming a preferred crime because criminals don’t have to worry about police chases, bank cameras or victims who may put up a fight.

“Now that people have figured out that you can do it, it’s spreading like crazy,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Andrew Brown.

The spread of mail theft comes in part because the public gives little thought to their mail, authorities say.

“The American public generally is a very trusting group of people. And a lot of times people perceive bills--incoming and outgoing--as having no value,” Bethel said. “But they are incredibly valuable.”

Federal prosecutors, postal inspectors and others familiar with mail theft say they believe it has been increasing noticeably in recent years--even though the Postal Service reports that arrests have remained steady over the last five years, at about 4,000 annually.

In Los Angeles, federal prosecutors say they’re swamped with mail theft cases, which make up at least one-third of the cases brought before the grand jury for indictments. Mail theft is a federal crime punishable by as much as five years in prison and $250,000 in fines.

Some groups of armed assailants--especially street gangs in Los Angeles--have been shaking down mail carriers at gunpoint for the keys to centralized mail drops. Others go straight to the source, holding up post offices, mail sorting facilities and registered-mail delivery trucks packed with mail-order valuables.

Account Numbers Lead to Phony Checks

Although federal authorities say it is virtually impossible to gauge the extent of mail theft, they believe there is an “exploding” new type of postal crime. Thieves are pilfering checking account numbers, which are used to print up phony checks--thanks to software programs available in any office supply store.

They are also increasingly engaged in “identity takeovers,” in which they create fake identities and bank accounts and use them to finance extravagant lifestyles.

Mail theft has been around as long as the mail itself. It’s one reason the job of postal inspector was created in the first place, in 1737. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were stealing the U.S. mail when the government sent a posse after them.

Today, the Postal Service’s criminal investigators remain busy. Two of them, postal inspectors Shawn Tiller and Anthony Galetti, are “catching bad guys as fast as we can prosecute them, sometimes even faster,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Larry Cho, chief of the general crimes prosecution unit in Los Angeles.

“These guys are in here [before the grand jury] once a week, which shows how prolific the problem is,” he said.

Federal authorities in Los Angeles and other major cities say they began seeing the increase in mail theft cases about eight years ago, around the same time crooks began “washing” checks in large numbers.

The bandits would use chemicals to obliterate everything written on the checks but the signatures, and replace the numbers with larger amounts made payable to themselves under assumed names.

The crime--known as “mailboxing”--may have originated in Hollywood, home to groups of heroin and methamphetamine addicts who would embark on citywide midnight runs for envelopes, say Tiller and Galetti, who tracked many of them.

As many as 40 drug addicts in Hollywood alone have been convicted for their roles in several conspiracies, according to records and interviews.

Some thieves simply reached into residential mailboxes that had red flags up, which signifies that the boxes contain outgoing mail.

Others devised resourceful ways of getting at valuable parcels, from dropping weights covered with sticky tape into mail drop boxes right before pickup to stuffing the boxes with cardboard so dropped-off letters would stay at the top, within easy reach. Others used crowbars to break into the big blue drop-offs.

It wasn’t long before the Hollywood crews--and others in Los Angeles--got more ambitious and began recruiting accomplices, according to court documents and authorities.

In one case, Galetti searched a house and found hundreds of checks that had been stolen by a local ring. One was a $100,000 check that a Beverly Hills woman had made out to her husband’s bank in Alhambra and put in her mailbox for pickup. But it had been washed, made out to a front company called Alliance Medical Management and deposited in that company’s account.

Authorities intervened before the $100,000 could be withdrawn, but found evidence that a lot of other bogus checks had been run through Alliance Medical, said Assistant U.S. Atty. Judy Heinz, who won convictions in the case. In the meantime, though, authorities believe such local check-washing rings have spread their know-how to Phoenix, Seattle, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City and other urban areas.

“They move to other cities,” said prosecutor Brown, “and teach their little buddy drug addicts how to do it, and it spreads.”

One ambitious mother-daughter team in Phoenix recently got caught after going door to door, ostensibly placing fliers in mailboxes on “check days.”

What they were really doing, authorities say, was removing more than 500 checks while their hands were in the boxes.

Another type of mail theft has occurred far more in Los Angeles than anywhere else, authorities say: break-ins of mail vehicles. Statistics show that such crimes peaked at 567 in 1994 but dropped off to almost nothing after the Postal Service beefed up security.

But each time they clamp down on one kind of theft, authorities say, the criminals simply come up with another method. They get more sophisticated and more brazen.

Carriers Robbed of Keys to Boxes

Starting in 1995, Los Angeles street gang members realized that mail carriers used so-called arrow keys to open every kind of mailbox on their routes, from personal boxes to huge drop-off centers. They began terrorizing the carriers, holding them up at knifepoint and gunpoint and demanding the keys, and the mail.

In 1995 alone, there were 107 letter-carrier robberies in Los Angeles, and 300 nationwide. Mail carriers balked at going into certain Los Angeles neighborhoods. Others held prayer sessions before hitting their routes.

“It was really traumatic for these carriers,” Postal Inspector Pamela Prince said. “Some had guns pointed at them, others were beaten, whipped, stabbed, bound, gagged.”

Ultimately, a loose cadre of Crips gang members got 26 of the arrow keys. They may have used them to steal tens of thousands of pieces of mail over a three-year period, prompting an expensive re-keying of the mailboxes so the keys wouldn’t work anymore.

In one apartment, authorities found that the gang had stashed $280,000 worth of washed or counterfeit checks, Cho said. But no one knows exactly how much they made off with in stolen checks, credit cards and other documents.

Tiller and Galetti ended up arresting 32 gang suspects, seizing an AK-47 and other weapons and receiving a distinguished achievement award from the postal inspection service earlier this month.

Other organized rings have concentrated on the booming business of identity theft.

When Los Angeles-based postal inspectors interviewed a woman recently arrested for trying to use a stolen Discover card, she admitted working for a group of Nigerian nationals who traveled the United States and other countries, stealing mail and committing credit card and bank fraud by taking over victims’ identities.

The woman led postal inspectors to a storage unit containing 107 credit cards, 101 credit card mailers, 54 counterfeit drivers’ licenses, apartment and mailbox keys and a mother lode of personal and financial information on people. That included more than 1,500 personal records, complete with names, Social Security numbers, addresses, bank account numbers and mothers’ maiden names.

“Once they assume your identity . . . they can do just about anything: get an apartment, a car, a bunch of credit cards in your name,” Bethel said. “And you’d never know until you apply for credit cards and find these people have absolutely destroyed your credit.”

Usually, banks and credit card companies cover the losses, but Bethel said that can take months or even years to straighten out.

“You may not be out any money, but think about not being able to get any credit,” Bethel said. “It can be catastrophic. You are crippled financially.”

To fight such thefts, postal inspectors send teams on surveillance missions and deploy them on the streets to protect mail carriers. Authorities also use hidden cameras and even send “test mail” to catch dishonest postal workers.

Postal employees go through extensive criminal background checks, and the Postal Service has a zero tolerance policy when it comes to mail theft--either from employees or people on the outside.

Nevertheless, records show a continuous string of organized mail thefts by postal employees over the years.

In recent years, postal inspectors in Los Angeles also have improved mailbox locks and installed security locking bars to make them more theft-proof.

Los Angeles has led the way in another prevention effort: Neighborhood Watch groups have been enlisted to help keep an eye on mail carriers and their trucks while the carriers are out on their routes.

The Postal Service has a standing offer of as much as $10,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone stealing mail or possessing stolen mail.

Despite such measures, many authorities concede that mail theft is too widespread for federal authorities to handle. A political and commercial solution is needed, critics say.

Los Angeles County officials responded to a series of welfare check thefts three years ago by approving a sort of automatic deposit system for recipients. That cut down dramatically on the Los Angeles thefts, but some say the criminals simply targeted recipients elsewhere.

2 Bank and credit card companies say they are concerned about mail theft and the fraud that results from it, but some in law enforcement maintain that they could do more.

In particular, banks could put some money into developing checks that can’t be washed so easily, prosecutor Brown said.

Greg Wilhelm, senior vice president of the California Bankers Assn. in San Francisco, countered by pointing out that most consumers these days don’t even buy their checks from banks.

The bottom line, he said, is that banks can’t possibly keep up with today’s enterprising criminals.

“With all the technological developments,” Wilhelm said, “keeping one step ahead of the crooks is going to be a never-ending chase, forever.”

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Preventing Mail Theft

To make it harder for thieves to steal your mail:

* Never send cash or coins in the mail. Use checks or money orders.

* Make sure your mailbox is secured and in good condition. Your postmaster can tell you how to improve your mailbox.

* Promptly remove mail from the mailbox after delivery, especially if you are expecting checks, credit cards, food coupons or other negotiable items. If you will not be home when valuable items are expected, ask a trusted friend or neighbor to pick up your mail.

* Have your post office hold your mail while you are on vacation or absent from home for a long period of time.

* If you do not receive a check, food coupon or other valuable mail you are expecting, contact the issuing agency immediately.

* Immediately notify your post office and the people you do business with through the mail if you change your address.

* Address your mail legibly and properly. Include complete return address, including street and apartment numbers, and nine-digit ZIP Code.

* Always deposit your mail in a Postal Service mail collection box or mail slot at your post office, or hand your mail to your letter carrier. Never place your outgoing mail for your carrier to pick up in an unprotected mailbox or area where it can be easily stolen.

* Consider starting a neighborhood watch program. By exchanging work and vacation schedules with trusted friends and neighbors you can watch each other’s mailboxes as well as homes. If you observe a mail thief at work, call the police immediately and then the postal inspector.

If you believe your mail has been stolen, report it immediately to your postmaster or postal inspector.

Source: U.S. Postal Service