It’s that time of the year…seems to happen every year around the holidays and seems to last until tax refund season ends…
Unfortunately, the mailbox thieves are at it again. We have reports of them hitting mailboxes on Dorothy Louise on Friday night / early Saturday morning.
Then, again in the early morning hours of Sunday:
“This morning at 4:03am (people) driving a white dodge dually truck broke into just about everybody’s mailbox. They pried open locked boxes. We caught the image of the truck on our ring camera, moving down the street, zig zagging from side to side, going to each mailbox. Please check your cameras to see if you got any footage – especially of the license plate.”
We have already reported this to the police. But if you have any information, please call the police or comment below.
What can we do? Here are several things you can consider, depending upon your personal situation:
1. The first thing we can all do is to contemplate what we have delivered to our mailboxes. In this digital age, we all have the option of converting most, if not all, of our financial statements / valuable documents to be delivered via email. Go green! It’s more secure than having paper documents delivered via mail and having them sit in an insecure mailbox.
2. If you need to receive critical (paper) documents for either personal or business reasons, consider getting either a PO Box at the local post office or a box at one of our neighborhood UPS Stores. Either way, this represents an added expense, but at least all your mail and packages will arrive in a reasonably secure environment (at least more secure than our roadside mailboxes seem to be).
3. Check your mailbox daily and don’t use your mailbox to deliver mail to the carrier, or at the very least, don’t leave mail overnight to be picked up by the carrier the next day. Either hand outgoing mail directly to the carrier, or take it to the post office or blue mailbox. If thieves consistently find empty mailboxes, maybe they will quit bothering.
4. If you are going to be away for a few days, you can stop delivery of your mail while you are away or ask a trusted neighbor to collect it for you each day. You can easily put a hold on mail to your address at usps.com. At the end of the hold, the carrier will either deliver all your mail or you can pick it up at the post office.
5. Sign up for Informed Delivery. This is a great service offered by USPS. Each day, you will receive an email containing images of the mail that will be delivered. This rarely includes images of bulk / junk mail or packages. But they do a pretty good job showing images of the first class mail. You can sign up for this service at: https://informeddelivery.usps.com.
Granted, all these diminish the usefulness of our mailboxes. It is sad that we have to take drastic and sometimes costly measures to protect our mailboxes.
The U.S. Code states that federal law protects mailboxes and those who tamper with mailboxes can be fined up to $250,000 or imprisoned up to 3 years for each act of mailbox vandalism. Sadly for us, the odds are slim that these vandals will be caught. That’s why it is critical for you to let the authorities know if you have any information that could lead to their arrest. The only way these transgressions will diminish is if the thieves realize the payoff is too small and the risk of getting caught is too great.