A Cautionary Tale for Postal Service Employees
Is serving time in federal prison and a criminal record worth some extra cash?
That’s something Postal Service employees must ask themselves as criminal organizations scale up efforts to recruit them to steal financial instruments from the mail. They promise quick, easy cash in exchange for checks, credit cards, debit cards, and other valuables. What follows is a trail of destruction and, inevitably, weighty legal consequences for all involved.
That’s how this case in Alabama started and ended: A man recruited a USPS employee to steal hundreds of checks destined for business PO Boxes at a local post office. On multiple occasions, she waded through envelopes containing high-dollar business checks and, throughout her shift, pocketed them while no one was looking. She later surrendered stacks of checks to the co-conspirator, who would alter and sell them on a popular social media app with the help of others involved in the scheme.
The co-conspirator wasn’t new to wrongdoing either — the investigation found he’d solicited another postal employee out in California and had an outstanding arrest warrant for another crime. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPS’s law enforcement arm) was already investigating him. That’s how the tip came to our Office of Investigations.
Our special agents and their law enforcement partners caught the employee red-handed, after which she admitted her role in the scheme. They arrested her and her co-conspirator, who was found with $10,000 cash, drugs, a handgun, and stolen checks valued at more than $417,000 at the time of his arrest. The pair had managed to steal more than $17 million from their victims by the time they were caught.
Prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Alabama worked quickly to bring this case to a close. In February this year, the employee was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay over $230,000 to her victims. The following month, her co-conspirator was sentenced to over eight years in prison and ordered to pay the same amount in restitution.
If you suspect or know of mail theft involving Postal Service employees or contractors, please report it to our Hotline.
For further reading:
Department of Justice (via uspsoig.gov), Two Mobile Defendants Sentenced to Prison for Massive Counterfeit Check Fraud Scheme Targeting the U.S. Mail