The Postal Service’s growing problem: ‘You cannot put checks in the mail safely’

When Linda Sciame, a Charlotte property manager, hears “the check is in the mail,” she worries.

It’s not that she doesn’t think the check was sent. It’s that she fears it will be stolen. Then there will be paperwork and delays for the tenants and for her.

Sciame has had her own mail stolen and many of the 145 small-business tenants served by her company, Atlantic Business Centers, have had the same trouble. She said many of them are sole proprietors who can’t afford to have a rent check go missing.

“I had a grown man crying. He said, ‘I’ll have to go to my father to lend me money because I don’t know what to do,’ ” she said.

Sciame is frustrated that the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), banks and police are not doing more about what she sees as a rising rate of mail theft. “What should be happening is the public should be made aware that you cannot put checks in the mail safely until they get a handle on this,” she told me this week.

Sciame’s husband, Gregory Finnican, is also frustrated about losing mail. He sent the Charlotte Observer a photos showing signs on three mailboxes warning that thieves had keys to the boxes. The Postal Service did not approve the signs and said many of the blue collection boxes now have enhanced security measures.

Mail theft may seem like an outdated problem in an era of electronic deposits, online banking and mobile phone apps that send and receive payments. But the mail is still full of checks, credit cards and greeting cards with cash inside. Thieves target not only private mail boxes but USPS boxes to pan the stream of mail for anything of value. Postal carriers have been robbed of their universal keys that open mailboxes.

It’s not a small problem. Chief Postal Inspector Gary Barksdale said in the U.S. Postal Inspection Service’s 2022 annual report that USPS has experienced “a dramatic rise in letter carrier robberies and related mail theft.”

In the first three months of this year, USPS said there have been more than 25,000 reported thefts from mail receptacles compared with 38,500 for all of 2022. The Postal Service has stepped up security measures, including replacing universal keys with electronic locks.

But the thefts are sometimes inside jobs. WRAL-TV reported last week that a Rocky Mount business says nearly $100,000 worth of its checks have been stolen from inside a local post office since January.

On Monday, Dena J. King, U.S. attorney for the Western District of North Carolina, announced the indictment of a former U.S Postal Service employee on charges that as a carrier in Charlotte she let her co-conspirators use a universal key to steal more than $40,000 in business checks.

In November of 2022, King announced the indictment of a former Charlotte postal carrier who was charged with stealing checks with a face value of more than $8.3 million. The checks are often sold to others who cash them or use the bank routing numbers for bank fraud.

King said in a statement that, “Our recent criminal prosecutions should serve as a warning to those who seek to profit by raiding mailboxes to steal people’s mail: We will find you and prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law.”

Postal customers can report suspicions of mail theft through the USPS online complaint hotline, or call 1-877-876-2455.

For most of her life, Sciame said, the Postal Service was safe and reliable “like mom and apple pie.” Now she is afraid to drop a check in the mail.

“The US Postal Service was like something that you just depended on. If we’re going to be a society, we have to be able to depend on these institutions. When you lose trust in them, the whole thing is going to implode,” she said.

Worries about mail theft shouldn’t obscure the daily miracle of what the U.S. Postal Service accomplishes. With more than 653,000 employees – the largest civilian workforce in the nation– it delivers more than 128 billion pieces of mail a year.

But that massive feat can be undermined by security gaps and a few dishonest or compromised employees. The Postal Service won’t protect its integrity by quietly dealing with the lapses. It should be open about the problem and clear about what is being done to solve it.

This story was originally published July 26, 2023 at 11:47 AM with the headline "The Postal Service’s growing problem: ‘You cannot put checks in the mail safely’."