If it was well hidden in cards or papers or something, if I wanted to send someone a surprise gift is this a bad way? What are the chances of it making it? Do authorities have some way of checking for currency? I guess for the amounts I have in mind they wouldn’t care, but what about international money laundering?
Depends on your location. In the US it is not illegal to send cash in the mail and they don’t check for it, but you have no recourse if it is lost or stolen. The USPS recommends you don’t do it but people do send small amounts.
FWIW my mother sent me a birthday card with a gift card to Best Buy enclosed a couple of years ago and a postal worker stole it. Don’t know how he knew what was inside. We know this because he was caught on store video using the card.
I once, at someone’s behest, sent upwards of $5,000 in cash, in various European currencies, through the mail. So far as I know, it got to its destination all right.
There was a family living in the area with the same name as my father, except for one letter in the name. I had an idiot grandfather that sent money in my birthday cards, regardless of the fact it was almost always stolen by that family. Sometimes the cards would make it to our house and the envelope had been obviously opened and resealed. I think I got the money only one year. He’d would get pissed because i didn’t send a thank you note. Thanks for sending cash for the other people could spend it in the bar. Those adults were always in the bar.
Postal employee checking in…
Firstly, although it hasn’t been mentioned in this thread, one of the most frequent things I’m asked is, “I heard you guys shine lights through letters to check what’s in them.”
A little Ockham’s Razor here:
No, we don’t. It’s illegal for postal workers in most countries to check out the contents, and we have no operational reason to do so (international mail is a different story, but even there we get the Customs guys to do it). We have machines that shine lights ON the letters to read the addressing, but notwithstanding the fact that these machines are decades younger than the urban legend itself, the machines also process mail at approx. 30 - 40k letters per hour. The operators don’t even see most articles when they pick up - concertina-style - a bundle of several hundred to feed in.
But yes, there is a risk. This risk is minimal. Large amounts of cash (more than several banknotes) will make for a thick letter that will need to be handsorted. However, sorters are under camera surveillance, and although mailmen are not, they can’t habitually steal stuff before a pattern emerges.
My advice (no responsibility assumed) is that it’s fine to send up to four or five bills in a standard envelope. The paranoids may wish to wrap a single A4 sheet around them. Larger amounts need to be sent in a parcel such as a CD mailer. The key is to keep the article anonymous-looking.
But really, I work in a facility that handles over a million articles daily. I don’t even get to feel most letters that pass through my hands. Sometimes I do, and sometimes I know there’s cash inside, but apart from my own ethics telling me not to touch it, it’s more than my job is worth.
That said, mail theft by employees does happen, but it is relatively rare. We do lose stuff sometimes though, but that’s generally through poor work practices rather than evil design.
I should point out that, if you have to send a specific amount, don’t do it if it’s not an even dollar amount. In the unlikely event that an employee is looking to steal stuff, he will feel for the quarter in the envelope, and nobody sends one quarter without a few notes as well. Stick that stuff in a parcel if you have to do it. Or mail a cheque.
The postal administration here is the same as the USPS in that sending cash isn’t illegal, but they strongly discourage it - I wonder if this isn’t to do with the fact that they collect fees from postal orders.
The problem isn’t what postal workers are supposed to do it’s what they ACTUALLY do. We have horrible delivery where I am and always have, and the post office doesn’t care. I’ve lived other places where they do.
Just last week I got a note in my mailbox saying they missed me and they had a package for me and I should pick it up. I went to get it and they said they couldn’t find it. When I complained to the postmaster of the post office, he said “Look if we don’t have it we don’t have it, if we find it it’ll get sent to your house and if we don’t it’ll probably go back to the sender.”
Postal employees will look for cards and such as they are more likely to contain cash. Remember it only takes one bad employee to steal and you have to prove it. In a small town that’s likely but not a big city.
As for international, I have friends overseas and I have never had a problem with anything being opened my friend sends me from New Zealand, but I have another friend in Australia and a lot of times I get things that are opened and sent to me in a plastic envelope with a note saying “This package has been opened for inspection.”
So I assume Australia searched it, as I’ve never seen that from New Zealand." And if it was the Americans doing it they’d search both I’d think.
Yeah, but as I alluded to above, most potentially dishonest postal workers (already a minority, I think) will realise that they are never going to get rich taking Little Johnny’s $10 from grandma, and if they do it over and over, they WILL get caught. There are also regular sting operations.
The customs and quarantine guys are the ones who actually physically open it. A postal officer watches them do it. Australian customs guys approach US levels in anal-ness, and our quarantine guys are even tougher. Sometimes, it’s random, but they will pretty much ALWAYS open a standard envelope that obviously has something other than papers in it and doesn’t have a customs declaration on it. Every single item entering the country is X-rayed (before 9/11, it was a random sampling only).
They do some other stuff too, but I am not at liberty to discuss that.
Since getting involved in the used/rare book trade, I’ve run into one UK dealer who routinely conducts business by sending cash via registered mail.
He claims that he’s yet to have a problem doing it that way…