Not long ago someone on social media made a comment on a local community site. They had just gone to the post office to drop off a letter at the drive up mail box outside of the post office. “I didn’t hear my letter drop,” they commented, “I remembered hearing about other people finding a sticky substance just inside the letter drop. This was put there by thieves in order to steal your mail. I put my hand in the mail box and there was my letter stuck on some sticky stuff that had been placed in attempts to steal mail.”
The post office was notified.
Most of us have no choice but to put our faith in the security of mailboxes, whether we’re sending off checks to pay bills, sending birthday cards filled with cash, or mailing off important documents with heaps of our personal information. But public mailboxes are a gold mine for thieves, and mail theft is more common than you may realize. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) said it received nearly 300,000 complaints about mail theft in just the last year.
When it comes to using curbside blue USPS mailboxes, we generally use whatever’s closest to us. But USPS says you shouldn’t do this if you notice suspicious substances on the mailbox, like glue or other sticky residue, immediately notify the post office staff. This is part of a mail fishing scam where thieves will fish mail out of public mailboxes with items such as bottles and mousetraps wrapped on a string and covered in sticky substances in hopes of catching checks and mail with personal information.
They throw it into the mailbox, and they literally fish around and then they pull out the mail, and then they look for envelopes that contain checks.
Besides looking out for sticky substances on public mailboxes, USPS has other tips you can utilize to protect yourself from mail theft. According to the postal agency, you should only deposit mail in blue collection boxes right before the last collection of the day, hand your mail to a letter carrier or mail it inside the post office, and use a gel or felt tip pen instead of a ballpoint pen to write out checks.
Some communities have even replaced the type of USPS mailboxes they use to protect against mail fishing, swapping out the traditional blue dropbox with a new mailbox that has a single slot and metal teeth to prevent mail from being fished back out.
The USPS has seen an increase in attacks on letter carriers and mail fraud incidents, with 305 mail carriers robbed in the first half of fiscal year 2023, on pace to exceed the previous year’s 412 robberies. At the same time, fraudsters are targeting mailboxes, either stealing letters directly from residents’ homes or from the blue USPS collection boxes, the postal service said.
The agency also recommends that people post mail inside their local post office or at their workplace; alternatively, they can hand their mail directly to a mail carrier.
