Why Mail Theft Is On the Rise

Mailboxes stand outside a United States Post Office in Claremont, Calif. Credit – Mario Tama/Getty Images

Catherine Venis no longer drops letters in the mailbox near her home in Flushing, N.Y. Instead, she walks six blocks to a post office and deposits them there. She’s noticed mail like birthday cards increasingly don’t get to her, and says her neighbors say the same.

“A lot of people around here have had missing mail,” she says of her neighborhood in Queens, where Congresswoman Grace Meng recently pushed the U.S. Postal Service to launch an investigation into the rise of mail theft.

Since the pandemic, mail theft has boomed. There was an 87% increase in reports of high-volume theft from mailboxes between 2019 and 2022, according to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. A report from the Government Accountability Office shows that the number of investigations into serious crimes investigated by the service nearly doubled between 2019 and 2023, from 609 cases to 1,198, an increase driven by a jump in robberies of mail carriers.

What Venis fears most about mail theft is having her identity stolen and her personal account information used by criminals. Those fears aren’t unfounded. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued an alert to financial institutions in Feb. 2023 asking banks to be vigilant about check-fraud schemes targeting the U.S. mail. In many cases, scammers take checks, use chemicals to wipe the writing off of them, and then rewrite them for tens of thousands of dollars. If consumers don’t let their banks know of the fraud in time, they can’t recoup their money. There were nearly 250,000 reports of suspicious activity around checks in 2021, the most recent year for which there was data available, a 158% from 2014, according to the Department of Treasury.

Read More: Defrauded? Banks Might Not Give You Your Money Back.

The Postal Service attributes the rise in theft to a few things: how easy it’s become to commit financial crimes using information stolen through the mail, the general uptick in fraud during the pandemic, and what it calls a “lax prosecutorial climate” for property crimes. It launched Project Safe Delivery in 2023 in an effort to shore up protections and launch technology and data to do more investigations.

But Edna Sepulveda thinks she has a better explanation for what’s causing the problem.   Sepulveda is a retired Postal Police Officer (PPO), part of a force responsible for preventing mail theft and protecting carriers. For 29 years, in Newark, N.J., Manhattan, and Florida, she patrolled high mail-crime areas, staked out mailboxes, and made arrests of people stealing mail—sometimes as they were fishing letters out of blue collection boxes.

Yet in 2020, the Postal Inspection Service told employees that PPOs could no longer work off Postal Service premises, according to a lawsuit filed in 2023 D.C. District Court by the Postal Police Officers Union. The 350 or so people who now work as PPOs can no longer do the type of work Sepulveda did; instead, they guard post office properties. That, according to Sepulveda and her union, the Postal Police Officers Association (PPOA), is part of what is driving the uptick in mail theft.  “So long as we’re there, we’re going to deter crime,” Sepulveda says. “Now, the criminals have no fear.”

The policy is a break from how the Postal Service has conducted security for two decades. Starting in the 2000s, the Postal Inspection Service decided that having PPOs at facilities wasn’t the best use of resources, and started deploying them on the street, according to Frank Albergo, president of the PPOA. PPOs targeted zip codes where mail theft was prevalent. The idea was to prevent crime in the first place, Albergo says, rather than catch people, investigate them, and imprison them.

Read More: How Easy Lending Can Lead to Fraud.

The new policy has motivated two lawsuits, a Congressional bill to reverse the policy, as well as pleas from postal workers to restore the police. “We cannot allow these kinds of assaults upon carriers and other postal employees to continue,” Ivan D. Butts, president of the National Association of Postal Supervisors, said in one such plea. “Greater PPO surveillance and patrols of high-risk neighborhoods, especially along the routes that carriers cover, is necessary.” The number of PPOs has shrunk from 425 in 2020 and 3,000 in the 1980s.

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service told TIME that PPOs are assigned to specific facilities to protect those facilities, and that the Postal Inspection Service has determined those facilities require a “high level of security.” Removing officers from those facilities would put employees and customers at risk, the organization said. In addition, the Postal Inspection Service deploys postal inspectors to investigate and prevent crimes like robberies of letter carriers—they are like detectives to the PPO’s beat officer.

The reassignment of PPOs correlates with a decrease in mail theft arrests and mail theft convictions and an uptick in mail carrier robberies. Whether it is the cause of those changes is up for debate. A May 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office shows that robbery, burglary, and assault crimes off USPS property are soaring, reaching 707 in 2023, while crimes on USPS property have fallen slightly between 2022 to 2023.

The GAO report also found that the US Postal Inspection Service has not fully documented its processes for determining the size and location of its postal inspectors and PPOs. The Inspection Service has not assessed the size and location of its workforce since 2011, the report found, adding that “it is unclear how long the Inspection Service will rely on outdated information to determine how to align its postal police workforce with current security needs.”

Banks and customers alike are scrambling to deal with the fraud that frequently happens after mail theft. Irv Acklesburg, a lawyer living in Philadelphia, says his credit-card company recently called to ask whether he’d used a new credit card to buy gas and take out cash. He hadn’t; it turned out the credit card had been stolen on its way to him. A postal inspector followed up to find out more, he says. He didn’t lose any money, but he knows that people can—two of his clients had a $84 check stolen in the mail, changed to $45,000, and cashed. They still haven’t gotten their money back.

Contact us at letters@time.com.