Ive heard that you can put the mailing address in the return slot at well as the mailing spot and then leave the envelope stampless. Then, when the post office went to return it, they would send it to where you wanted it to go. I heard awhile back that Citibank was doing this with some of its prepaid envelopes, but not sure if thats true. Has anyone ever tried this to see if it actually works?
I’ve seen it on some bank envelopes.
I figure Citibank can get away with it, but I’d have a SWAT team show up at my door.
That is illegal.
Questions asking for advice on how to commit crimes are frowned upon by our Board & our Mods.
It is also unethical.
I wasnt interested in doing it myself. I just heard about it and thought maybe someone had tried it as an experiment.
Before I started paying my insurance premiums online, Allstate would send me a return envelope with their name as the receipient and sender. I would put an address label on the back, just in case.
I do not work for the USPS, but my husband does as a letter carrier. From what I’ve learned of the Postal Service over the years, I can give my guesses but don’t take these as any kind of truth. The USPS has a Postal Inspector division which investigates all forms of mail fraud, so I suspect that widespread use of this method would result in something similar - at the very least, checking the mail to see if evidence of the sender (like, say, the address on a bill or check) can be determined. I suspect the company receiving such an envelope, if it did get through, might be less than pleased as that might be treated as a postage due mailing and thus they get dinged for a full first-class postage charge for each that they receive.
Somehow I doubt Citibank actually did that without also having a contract for prepaid postage with the USPS. They would be amazingly easy to both notice (due to volume) and bust. I have seen other corporations use envelopes where their envelopes have their address on for the mailing and the return addresses, but they also have a prepaid postage situation set up.
Sorry, I’m not properly caffeinated yet and wasn’t thinking clearly - you will see businesses who send out billing envelopes that require stamps and are labeled as such who put their address in the return and mailing positions, as well. It seems most businesses that send out bills (in my experience) do not have prepaid postage on them, however. It’s likely that Citibank expected you to put a stamp on their envelope if they didn’t have a prepaid postage setup, not that they decided to get around the USPS charges.
How about the pre-paid postage envelopes you get with all your junk-mail credit card offers?
Can you use these envelopes to send mail to whomever you like just by putting a new address label over their preprinted address?
Well, besides the fact that it’d be postal fraud and thus a violation of Federal law, I suspect the address for the place is also present in a bar code at the bottom of the envelope and would probably just be machine-sorted to go to the original, proper location. And any alert company that receives such a doctored envelope would probably be very eager to track down the person doing it.
Habibi, we will not aid you or anyone in circumventing the law.
Do not start a thread of this nature again.
Cajun Man
for the SDMB