I work as an instructor for a few companies, none of which reside in my local area. Whenever I finish a teaching gig, the company I taught for pays me, sometimes electronically, sometimes with a check. So naturally I was curious when I saw this headline the other day:
Now, reading a bit further (because I don’t trust any headline, and you shouldn’t either), I realized its NOT the Postal Service saying this, its instead a member of the Better Business Bureau. That person had good reason to say this, because she noted that check fraud jumped from 300,000 incidents to 680,000 incidents in 2021, despite Americans writing less checks every year.
The issue doesn’t seem to be with residential mailboxes, but rather with the large, outdoor blue post boxes. Post boxes are being broken into at an alarming rate. In some cases, the criminals rob the postal worker to get the key to open the blue boxes. In other cases, they simple beat the boxes open with some blunt instrument. Once they get the checks, it’s not hard to erase the amount with a chemical solution and re-write the check for significantly more than was originally intended.
Checks are probably one of the few items to still be regularly mailed, and the post office was quick to note that its still safe (in their words) to mail checks:
“The Postal Service delivers about 130 billion pieces of mail over a year to 163 million customers,” said Paul Shade with the U.S.P.S. “It still remains the most secure way to transmit anything from any type of mailing.”
Paul Shade, USPS
The Post Office also noted it was installing high security boxes that are more difficult to break into.
There is a trend in the statistics. Going city by city, each “bubble” lists the incidents and arrests. Take a look at California:
Los Angeles: 54 incidents, 1 arrest
Oakland: 51 incidents, 4 arrests
San Francisco: 20 incidents, 2 arrests
And at Texas:
Houston: 97 incidents, 12 arrests
Dallas: 25 incidents, 2 arrests
Vs. Florida:
Miami: 15 incidents, 7 arrests
Tampa: 3 incidents, 3 arrests
Although I didn’t have full access to the data to calculate an arrest to incident ratio, I suspect that California would come out on the losing end of that calculation. Florida’s numbers are significantly lower than expected, and I’d reason its the fact that they make arrests and actually prosecute crimes. If you knew you could simply steal a bag of mail, cash a bunch of washed checks and face little to no chance of repercussion, well, why wouldn’t you?
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.
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