Is it illegal to send cash in the mail?
I’m pretty sure that it isn’t. Survey companies sometimes send dollar bills in the mail to get people to fill out their surveys.
It’s not illegal. Just foolhardy. Unless you can disguise it really well, say, by enclosing it in something a strong light won’t shine through.
It’s 100% legal to send currency through the mail. The “Do Not Send Cash” statements are not a legal mandate, but a caveat, a warning, that if you mail money and it doesn’t reach its destination, you’ve effectively lost it. (In theory it’s a federal crime of theft of money via the mails; in practice, it’s unlikely the perpetrator will be caught.)
Once, long ago in a galaxy far away, I was stationed overseas. I was a coin collector, and ordered a “bullion grade” $20 gold piece. The coin arrived taped to a piece of thin cardboard in a regular envelope. It didn’t have a return address of “Valuable Coins Inside” but I was still a bit surprised. What if it got munched in the machine?
Lots of people send cash through the standard first class mail system. It’s not a great idea, but it works fine. Another fellow who won a BIG multi-state lottery sent in his winning ticket in for verification through standard US mail. A better bet is to use “Restricted Delivery” signature confirmation, or insured Express mail for valuable items.
One time I got a nickle in the mail from some company doing a promotion. It was a very very new nickle (the new Jefferson design) and the envelope had a window in the top where the nickle was pasted on the paper inside. No one thought to steal my mail with the visible nickle.
Stupid promotion because I have no idea what it was promoting. But I still have the nickle in my office.
If you must send currency, insure it for the full amount. Special rules apply for many substances. Ask the postal clerk before mailing.
If you don’t mind being your own insurance company send it right along. It’s at your risk.
Postal worker checking in…
This idea that we shine bright lights through mail to check the contents is extremely hard to kill.
We. Don’t. Do. It.
The vast majority of standard letters never even touch human hands until your mailman gets them. Most mail these days is business mail, and that is well suited to being sorted by machine. These articles, such as utility bills, are delivered to a sorting centre (occasionally a normal post office) in bulk, and the only human contact there is when folks grab big wads of the stuff between two hands (maybe 300 letters at a time) and feed them into the sorting machines. At the other end of the machine, another person takes them out in big handfuls, places them into a tray, where they go to another city’s centre and a similar process happens there, as they get more finely sorted.
There is no technical need to shine a light through a letter in an effort to discern the contents, and doing so would result in being fired, as it is illegal. We do shine lights on letters - well the machines do - and that is to illuminate the barcodes so the barcode reader can do its job. Each letter is illuminated for about a fifth of a second, and even if you peer into the machine, it hurts your eyes, and the letters are a blur of brilliant white at speed.
Now to the letters which are hand sorted… Yes, I can sometimes tell that there’s cash in one, and that’s when people send coins. If you feel a coin through the paper, odds are there will be notes in there as well. If you place a $100 bill on its own in a crisp new envelope, there’s no way I would know what it was.
That said, postal employees do pilfer stuff, but it’s rare. I certainly wouldn’t want to lose my job for the chance of maybe getting twenty bucks, but some people do it. They also tend to get caught eventually - sorting facilities are bristling with CCTV cameras. Your mailman could do it easily - a couple of times - until complaints from people on his beat start mounting up. I’ve never heard of a postal employee getting rich from theft.
If you want to send cash in the mail, consider sending itas part of a parcel (maybe in a computer disk mailer). NEVER send cash in a greeting card (postal employees who do break the rules will go for something to “Little Johnny” from “Grandma” rather than a bill from the power company. Never send coins in an envelope. Not only do they make cash obvious, but they foul the machines, and I suspect that much of the time that money never arrives is because the letter has been shredded beyond recognition. The only thing to go in a standard envelope is paper. Not coins, keys, pens, etc. Anything else is for parcels.
Fundraiser for charities checking in:
Lots and lots of people send donations with cash instead of cheques/postal notes. As far as I know, not one of them has ever gone astray.
And to disagree with Loaded, we once had a little old lady send us $13 in coins…it didn’t go walkies or screw up the machines (to my knowledge) either.
If I ever won a lottery, I’d drive personally to the lottery office and redeem it. I wouldn’t trust the US Mail with anything like that.
That’s what I was thinking. That ticket would not be leaving my hands.
Post office: Would you like to insure this?
Me: Yeah, for forty million dollars, please. 
Question here Loaded Dog
Sometimes we read abou a postal worker who has failed to deliver mail over a period of time and when enough
people have complained his home is searched and thousands of undelivered items are found.
More often than not these are unopened and are just dumped under his/her bed/wardrobe/garden shed wherever.
Why doesn’t the worker open them and then burn them?
I’m not a postal worker, but my guess is there wasn’t a plan to pile up thousands of pieces of undelivered mail. The postal worker fell behind, and figured they’d deliver the balance of today’s mail with tomorrow’s deliveries. Then something else happened, maybe they got sick, maybe the weather was bad, it was Publisher’s Clearing House day or something, and they fell even more behind. Once you start piling it up it’s really hard to start catching up, because you’re already delivering as much as you can.
Eventually the mail in the shed has been delayed by so much that delivering it will attract a lot of attention. You can picture what would happen if a bunch of six month old mail got delivered all at once. There’s really no way out once you’re in that deep. I’d bet most of the workers who are eventually caught are almost relieved to be found out.
Possibly right Bill Doors but why doesn’t the postal worker burn 'em when it gets outta hand
Yes, Bill is 100% correct. there have been several cases in the UK in recent years (this is what happens under deregulation when people are pushed harder and harder - some can’t handle it). I recall in one of the newspaper articles, the guy actually did mention it was a relief.
Though, there was also one in which the mail in the postman’s house had been rifled through, but generally it starts off almost innocently.
But ** why** doesnt he/she burn them and get rid of the evidence
Guilt. Though they know they are doing something wrong by delaying/not delivering, they can’t bring themselves to actually destroy it. That would be “wrong.” (Or more wrong as the case may be)
Bad logic, but emotion often gets the better of logic.
The end of this thread puts me in mind of what just happened to us (not to mention all our neighbors). The guy who mows our lawn and clears snow said our last check to him had arrived a month after he rendered it. It didn’t bother him, but he said the envelope had been rubber stamped that it was delayed by the post office. Having paid our Sears bill in full in early August, we got rebilled in Sept plus interest at 28.8% (if that isn’t usury, I don’t know what the term means). And there was a third bill that arrived a month late. The post office said they would investigate, although by then they knew perfectly well what happened. I asked our mailman a day later and he said he knew all about it. That mailbox hadn’t been cleared for three weeks. The newly assigned driver (he was experienced, but it was a new assignment) had geen given a list of boxes to collect and had made up a route and inadvertently left this box off his route. Eventually, someone complained when they couldn’t stuff anything else into the box. The driver got suspended for a week without pay and all the mail was eventually delivered.
I recommend Terry Pratchett’s “Going Postal” for a rather extteme example. Actually, I recommend anything by Terry Pratchett. By the way, eventually Sears reversed the interest charge.