2/18/16 CORONA, Calif. (KABC) — Neither rain nor snow can stop the U.S. mail, but thieves, that’s another story.
A community in Corona has found its postal delivery shut down after multiple reports of identity theft and letters being stolen from locked mailboxes.
The residents of Sycamore Creek had complained to the U.S. Postal Service for months about the thefts.
“Tons of mail theft – we were getting hit daily,” said resident Larissa Adrian. “We’ve had multiple thefts of identity, people having their accounts wiped, credit cards taken.”
Then suddenly last week the Post Office shut down delivery to some 1,300 residents.
A spokesperson said the thieves had apparently obtained counterfeit master keys.
Mail theft in Corona leads to delivery shutdown
Couple years ago the POS clusterbox that sits across from our house got taken out by a city snowplow during the winter. Took them a couple of weeks to replace, so crappy service interruption during a very busy Christmas season on our block. The base was beginning to rust away so it was only a matter of time (How much did the new one cost?)…Clearly a door slot or a box on or near the house makes it a helluva lot harder for the criminal element to do this kind of crap…the bad guys might be thinking they hit the jackpot by trying to steal from 10, 20 or 30 houses with one clusterbox…conversely, with individual home deliveries, the mail gets additional added safety and security features on 2 and sometimes 3 additional levels: (1) Door slots: most if not all of the mail is safe and impossible to steal once it is through the slot. (2) Box on or near a house: few to none of the lazy a$$ criminal element would take the time, effort, and chances of getting caught by going house to house and trying to steal people’s mail. (3) The good old fashioned letter carriers that work in their park and loop neighborhoods often have a gut check sense for suspicious activity in their neighborhoods and can keep an extra eye out for things being out of the ordinary by making sure that items of a sensitive nature are delivered to their people directly when they happen to be at home at the time of delivery…All in a days work! Good, quality, safely delivered mail service, provided to you, not by drones, robots, or metal boxes, but human beings who are looking out for their fellow human beings on their routes…Is all that in the morning DOIS projection? Just sayin…
All it takes is the generic arrow key. I’m not sure how a thief would get their hands on one unless a carrier was in cahoots and had a copy made for their accomplice. I certainly hope that’s not the case because every time we get this kind of news item it makes us all look bad.
Plus, those plastic NDCBU’s are easily cracked, damaged, etc. so you can probably get to the latch with just a couple whaps of a hammer.
It is high time to revisit the “universal service” pledge to all customers. If people in bad neighborhoods can’t leave postal property alone, and that includes boxes on homes and those by the curb, then customers should be made to have to rent PO boxes. If it means expanding an office or building a small substation so be it. Privileges are earned, and can and should be lost to thugs and skank who make life hell for innocent people. I’d love to catch the hackers who have, over time, ruined at least three of my computers, getting past the anti-viruses, firewalls, etc. It would be very ugly.