ST. LOUIS — A south St. Louis man has a warning for people about dropping mail in those blue post office boxes. He said he was the target of a "check-washing" scam.
Nearly two weeks ago, Erich Vieth said he placed a check in this U.S. Postal Service blue collection box in the city's Shaw neighborhood. The check was for his insurance company.
"It had my signature on it, it had somebody else as the payee. The amount had increased from $1,700 [to] $4,500. I thought OK? This must be what check-washing is all about. I'd heard about it, but didn't know how prevalent it was," Vieth said.
Vieth said Simmons Bank flagged his account for fraud three days later.
They told him someone posed as him and wanted to make small deposits before cashing in the $4,500 check. Additionally, they told Vieth he needed to close his account and create a new one. The scam is called "check-washing."
In August 2023, a U.S. District judge sentenced a man to 10 months in prison for stealing 179 personal and business checks from collection boxes.
"The system is set up to not protect our mail," Vieth said.
Frank Albergo, president of the Postal Police Officers Association, said the U.S. Postal Inspection Service doesn't have a mail strategy in place and it won't be ready until September 2024, just before a major election. Albergo said the number of officers protecting mail workers has decreased nationally from 3,000 to 450. Only 15 of them protect the City of St. Louis.
"St. Louis should hang on because it's just going to get worse and worse. Once it starts, it's very hard to stop. The postal service has a uniformed postal police force. We're uniformed federal officers. We should be out in the streets protecting letter carriers. We should be protecting the mail. But instead, we're protecting buildings," Albergo said.
On Sept. 28, the USPS Office of Inspector General released an audit report that evaluated the U.S. Postal Service’s response to the Mail Theft Epidemic.
The OIG found that the U.S. Postal Inspection Service:
- Does not have deployment timelines with actionable milestones for mail theft prevention and letter carrier protection initiatives.
- Lacks accountability for USPS arrow keys, which are often the target in letter carrier robberies.
- Has not finalized a mail theft strategy.
- Has not assessed and assigned resources nationally to address mail theft.
- Does not have specialized training in the investigation of mail theft.
- Does not even know the purpose of its Mail Theft Analytics Program; only devotes a “minuscule fraction” of its overall analytics contract to mail theft; and assigned only 1% of active mail theft cases during the fiscal years 2021 and 2022 based upon a referral from the analytics program.
- Assigned only 37% of postal inspectors to work mail theft cases in the fiscal year of 2022.
Vieth's advice for the U.S. Postal Service is simple.
"What they really should do is put signs on the blue boxes and say if you put your check in this blue box we cannot protect it from thieves," Vieth said.
The U.S. Attorney's Office in St. Louis recommends these tips to avoid mail theft:
- Don’t let incoming or outgoing mail sit in your mailbox. You can significantly reduce the chance of being victimized by simply removing your mail from your mailbox every day.
- Deposit outgoing mail (ESPECIALLY CHECKS) through a number of secure manners including inside your local Post Office at your place of business or by handing it to a letter carrier.
- Sign up for Informed Delivery and get daily digest emails that preview your mail and packages scheduled to arrive soon.
- Become involved and engaged in your neighborhood via neighborhood watches and local social media groups to spread awareness and share information.
- Keep an eye out for your letter carrier. If you see something that looks suspicious, or you see someone following your carrier, call 911.