Keep your money out of the mail: Matthews residents seeing checks stolen, police say
Matthews police has warned local businesses and residents to mind their mailboxes, following multiple reports of checks that were plucked from the post and fraudulently deposited.
The old-fashioned method of stealing funds has grown more common over the last couple months, according to Tim Aycock, public information officer for the Matthews Police Department.
At the end of November, the department posted on its Facebook page advising residents to avoid paying their bills via mail due to an increase in fraudulently cashed checks.
That month, the department received about a dozen such reports in just a two-week period, Aycock said.
“That time of year is a very busy time in general. There’s a lot of money changing hands,” he said. “The bad guys are looking at that as an opportunity to take advantage of all that extra mail.”
Thieves had been breaking into the mailboxes of local commercial buildings, Aycock said, and stealing outgoing envelopes from local companies. Then they could alter the checks in a number of ways to cash them out for themselves, he said.
Another way to steal from people
One recent post on social media site NextDoor detailed another method thieves could use to intercept checks.
The original poster, who said she works at a bank branch in Charlotte, wrote that she’s seen people create fake business documents to deposit the checks. “The fraudsters are also (stealing) the checks and endorsing them ‘pay to the order’ and just depositing them into their personal accounts,” she wrote. “(It means that) you, the business owner, are out of luck.”
Some people commented that they’d experienced similar thefts.
“My parents had a $1,600 check stolen,” one user wrote. “It took the bank months to replace the money. We pay her property taxes online now.”
Another wrote that their company had six checks stolen. And a third person said their small business had seen a spike in such thefts and was pushing all its business partners to switch to electronic or inter-bank transfer payments as a result.
Missing checks still under investigation
Check thieves typically target individuals more often than businesses, Aycock said.
“A lot of times when we have had those (reports) in the past, they’ll target a certain street and take mail out of several boxes,” he said.
Aycock said there hasn’t been a recent arrest in Matthews related to the stolen checks and he hasn’t heard of one at another local department.
The Matthews police department hasn’t yet identified a suspect for the recent thefts, Aycock said.
The best way to avoid having your own checks intercepted by scammers is keeping them out of the mail by making payments digitally, he said. If you do need to mail a check, the safest way to do so is by taking the envelope to the post office yourself.
This isn’t the first time residents and businesses have seen their mail stolen in the Charlotte area in the last year.
In June, prosecutors charged Kyree Corbett with armed robbery, possession of property of the United States and conspiracy, related to an alleged massive mail theft operation, according to Observer news partner WSOC.
Prosecutors said Corbett robbed a postal worker at gunpoint, WSOC reported, stealing her master key and using it to take $1.8 million worth of checks from mailboxes in Ballantyne and south Charlotte.
This story was originally published January 5, 2023 at 1:50 PM.
