LOS ANGELES – A former United States Postal Service letter carrier from Orange County was sentenced today to 66 months in federal prison for stealing from the mail more than $10 million in Treasury and other checks over a four-year span.

Rashad Deon Stolden, 34, of Huntington Beach, was sentenced by United States District Judge R. Gary Klausner, who also ordered him to pay $1,627,291 in restitution.

Stolden pleaded guilty on April 14 to one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud. Stolden worked at the Bicentennial Post Office, located in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles.

According to his plea agreement and court documents previously filed in this case, from 2020 through August 2024, Stolden stole mail containing large value checks, as well as debit cards from the California Employment Development Department (EDD), which manages the state’s unemployment insurance program.

Stolden worked alongside another letter carrier and friends, Charlie Green, 37, of the Wellington Heights area of East Los Angeles, who is scheduled for sentencing on September 14. Stolden and Green sold the checks they stole to co-conspirators who then used counterfeit identity documents to negotiate them. Stolden and his co-conspirators purchased the identifying information of victims so that they could activate their stolen EDD cards.

In June 2022, Stolden stole a $7.3 million Treasury check. He then sold the check to a co-conspirator, who negotiated it at a bank in Tennessee, writing him, “I need you man,” “I’m trying to retire,” according to court documents. The co-conspirator was able to withdraw more than $1 million from the deposit of this check.

Some of Stolden’s co-conspirators have been prosecuted in separate court proceedings. Both Stolden and Green remain free on $50,000 bond.

“Nowhere in [Stolden’s] voluminous communications throughout this conspiracy did he express any empathy for his victims even as he stole their EDD cards containing their disability and unemployment benefits,” prosecutors argued in a sentencing memorandum. “[Stolden] seemed to think only of his own profits, trying to decide whether he should use his thefts to pay for a $13,000 hotel stay in Bora Bora, or if he should upgrade to a $20,000 stay in the Presidential Villa at the Conrad.”

The United States Postal Service Office of Inspector General; the United States Postal Inspection Service; the U.S. Department of Treasury for Tax Administration; U.S. Customs and Border Protection; and the Coast Guard Investigative Services investigated this matter.

Assistant United States Attorney Andrew Brown of the Major Frauds Section prosecuted this case.