Increase in mail theft and fraud in Colorado tied to missing U.S. Postal Service carrier keys
Mail theft complaints are on the rise in Colorado, in part, because of the key system used by the U.S. Postal Service.
In March, CBS News Colorado told you about a neighborhood in Westminster that has been dealing with missing packages for years, after the master key their mail carrier used was stolen.
A closer look at the numbers revealed a widespread problem that federal officials believe is also leading to an increase in check fraud.
Katie Nance knows the financial impacts all too well.
"I was in Westminster alone during a pandemic. I'm like going, 'oh my God, now there's somebody who has my identity,'" Nance said.
It started when she renewed her driver's license online.
"Every single day I was getting dings about new inquiries and frantically checking my credit report," she said. "Just a lot of chaos."
She was out of town when it was delivered in the mail and by the time she returned. It was gone and almost immediately thieves went to work with her information.
"They tried opening these credit cards. I had to get them shut down," she said.
Eventually, they used her driver's license and savings account to cash fraudulent checks.
"The total was probably about four thousand dollars they were able to deposit it into my savings account and then immediately withdraw it," Nance said.
It's an issue the U.S. Department of the Treasury warned about last year issuing a nationwide alert to banks that fraud targeting U.S. mail was on the rise.
"You know, we're way beyond washing checks. At this point, you can counterfeit a check. You can go to staples, and you can buy blank check stocks," Frank Albergo said.
Albergo is the national president of the Postal Police Officer's Association. He's been closely monitoring the rise in mail theft.
He says it's skyrocketed since the USPS reduced the number of postal police officers on the street and restricted their jurisdiction to police inside facilities only.
"It's no secret that boxes, you know, can be opened by keys, right? So, they figured out, 'oh, well, letter carriers have these keys. Let's get the key, and then we'll have access to all the mail. We won't just fish a few letters out. We'll get all the mail, and not only will we get the mail from the blue collection box, we'll get the mail from the cluster boxes from the apartment panels,'" Albergo said. "So, it's been an absolute disaster. And while that's going on they pull postal police off the street."
An independent audit of the United States Postal Service from last fall found hundreds of thousands of arrow keys are in use but when one is stolen or fraudulently duplicated, the postal service has no way of stopping the use.
"It's getting worse and worse. Letter carries every day as, you know, letter carries every day. Have a gun stuck in their face, and those arrow keys are being stolen," Albergo added.
In Colorado last month alone, two carriers were robbed in Denver's Montebello neighborhood and a third in Colorado Springs with carriers in Aurora and Lakewood also attacked in the past.
In response to the increase in robberies, USPS launched "Project Safe Delivery" with plans to upgrade forty- nine thousand locks across the country.
Albergo says that the number is minimal.
"There's 9 million arrow key locks. So, they're replacing less than 1%," he said.
While USPS has declined to sit down with CBS News Colorado on multiple occasions and did not return a request for an interview for this story, the March 2024 edition of the Postal Service's quarterly magazine "The Eagle" acknowledges the problem.
In the article, they say, "while there is no single reason for this crime wave, the catalyst may be a combination of relief fraud perpetrated during the COVID-19 pandemic, the ease of committing financial crimes using cyber-enabled techniques, and a lax prosecutorial climate for property and financial crimes in some U.S. jurisdictions."
For consumers like Nance, now facing a lifetime of uncertainty, the solution or at the very least. a good place to start seems obvious.
"It's just wild to me that in this day and age, it's still a physical piece of hardware that's what's controlling the safety of our mail," Nance said.
USPS recently highlighted a 73% increase in arrests for letter carrier robberies this year, compared to the same period last year.
They also shared tips to protect yourself, such as avoiding letting mail sit in your mailbox and sending mail using a secure location like inside a post office. They also suggest signing up for informed delivery, so you know what should be in your box, and say to always keep an eye out for your carrier.
