Mail Theft Is Increasing: Why?

Catherine Venis has stopped using the mailbox near her home in Flushing, N.Y. Instead, she walks six blocks to a post office to drop off her letters. She’s noticed that mail, such as birthday cards, increasingly doesn’t reach her, and says her neighbors experience the same issue.

“A lot of people around here have had missing mail,” she says about her neighborhood in Queens, where Congresswoman Grace Meng recently urged the U.S. Postal Service to investigate the problem.

Mail theft has surged since the pandemic. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service reported an 87% increase in mail theft from mailboxes between 2019 and 2022. A Government Accountability Office report revealed that the number of serious crime investigations conducted by the service almost doubled from 609 cases in 2019 to 1,198 in 2023, driven by a sharp rise in robberies against mail carriers.

Venis’s biggest fear regarding mail theft is identity theft and her personal account information being misused by criminals. These concerns aren’t unfounded. In February 2023, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued an alert to financial institutions, urging banks to be cautious about check-fraud schemes targeting the U.S. mail. In many cases, scammers steal checks, erase the writing with chemicals, and rewrite them for tens of thousands of dollars. If consumers don’t inform their banks about the fraud promptly, they may not be able to recover their funds. The Department of Treasury reported nearly 250,000 reports of suspicious check-related activity in 2021, the latest year for which data is available, representing a 158% increase from 2014.

The Postal Service attributes the rise in theft to several factors: the ease with which financial crimes can be committed using information stolen through the mail, the general increase in fraud during the pandemic, and what it describes as a “soft spot” for property crimes. The agency launched Project Safe Delivery in 2023 to strengthen protections and utilize technology and data for more thorough investigations.

Edna Sepulveda, a retired Postal Police Officer (PPO) who dedicated 29 years to preventing mail theft and protecting carriers in Newark, N.J., Manhattan, and Florida, offers a different perspective. During her tenure, she patrolled high-crime areas, monitored mailboxes, and apprehended mail thieves, often catching them in the act of retrieving letters from blue collection boxes. 

However, in 2020, the Postal Inspection Service informed employees that PPOs could no longer work outside Postal Service premises, according to a lawsuit filed in 2023 in D.C. District Court by the Postal Police Officers Union. The roughly 350 PPOs currently employed are no longer able to perform the type of work Sepulveda did; their responsibilities now involve guarding post office properties. According to Sepulveda and her union, the Postal Police Officers Association (PPOA), this policy contributes to the increase in mail theft.  “As long as we’re there, we deter crime,” Sepulveda says. “Now, the criminals have no fear.” 

This policy represents a departure from the Postal Service’s security approach for the past two decades. In the early 2000s, the Postal Inspection Service decided that stationing PPOs at facilities wasn’t the most effective use of resources, and began deploying them on the streets, according to Frank Albergo, president of the PPOA. PPOs focused on zip codes with high mail theft rates. The goal, Albergo explains, was to prevent crime proactively rather than reacting to incidents, investigating them, and pursuing prosecution.

The new policy has prompted two lawsuits, a Congressional bill to reverse it, and appeals from postal workers to reinstate the police force. “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, stated in one appeal. “Greater PPO surveillance and patrols of high-risk neighborhoods, especially along the routes that carriers cover, are necessary.” The number of PPOs has dwindled from 425 in 2020 to a mere 3,000 in the 1980s.

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service told TIME that PPOs are assigned to specific facilities to protect them, and that the Postal Inspection Service has deemed these facilities to require a “high level of security.” Removing officers from these facilities would pose risks to employees and customers, the organization stated. Additionally, the Postal Inspection Service deploys postal inspectors to investigate and prevent crimes such as robberies against letter carriers—they serve as detectives while PPOs act as beat officers.

The reassignment of PPOs coincides with a decrease in mail theft arrests and convictions, as well as an increase in mail carrier robberies. Whether this reassignment is the cause of these changes remains a point of contention. A May 2024 report by the Government Accountability Office revealed that robbery, burglary, and assault crimes off USPS property are skyrocketing, reaching 707 in 2023, while crimes on USPS property have declined slightly between 2022 and 2023.

The GAO report also found that the US Postal Inspection Service hasn’t adequately documented its procedures for determining the size and location of its postal inspectors and PPOs. The Inspection Service hasn’t assessed the size and location of its workforce since 2011, the report noted, 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 are grappling with the fraud that often follows mail theft. Irv Acklesburg, a Philadelphia lawyer, recounted how his credit-card company recently contacted him to inquire about a new credit card purchase for gas and cash withdrawal. He hadn’t made the transaction; it turned out his credit card had been stolen in the mail. A postal inspector followed up to gather more information, he said. He didn’t lose any money, but he’s aware of others who have. Two of his clients had an $84 check stolen in the mail, altered to $45,000, and cashed. They haven’t recovered their funds.