I my town, breaking into mailboxes is rampant. At my work it’s happened several times. And we have cameras.
I live in a gated community with cluster mailboxes. It’s an ‘over 55’ neighborhood. The mailboxes were broken into again today. Last time was about 3 weeks ago.
At work, I’m pretty sure it’s the homeless (I saw the video). And we’ve had trouble with homeless here in the park too,
I assume they are after checks. My question is, who is cashing all of those stolen checks? In todays world of high security and bank cameras and sophisticated IDs, it just doesn’t seem to make sense.
They might be after anything that contains personal identification information, medical information, etc., etc. That stuff might be easier to sell than trying to cash a check.
Well, the USPS has issued warnings to not use mailboxes on weekends because stealing checks is on the rise.
Crooks use chemicals to wash off the ink and change who it’s made out to and the amount.
I had a check stolen a few years ago. It was cashed at a local bank and no account number was written on it (standard procedure). The endorsement looked nothing like my name. I was out the money.
Why would they be on the rise? The use of checks for Social Security, payroll has increasingly been replaced by direct deposit. The number of checks issued is declining at a rate of 7%/year:
So based on my experience (I had some checks stolen in a burglary a few years ago) its smaller stores out in the boonies. I had checks stolen from my home in the SF Bay Area and they were used a year or two later at clothing store in the middle of nowhere in Oregon.
Whats irritating is I had reported them stolen, but that doesn’t mean they can’t use them, it just means they don’t try and take the money out of your account it instantly becomes a bad check cashed on your account (as if I had used a check and had insufficient funds). Which then needs to be sorted out with identity theft affadavits and such.
We had a problem where some guy stole a credit card application out of our mail, applied for it, and then stole mail out of my mailbox every day until it arrived then started using the credit card. I only noticed the credit card thing when I got a letter from my credit card company thanking me for opening a new account.
I had to buy a new mailbox with a lock for this very reason.
Really? In the old days, all you had to do was go to the bank and swear that you didn’t write the check and the bank refunded the money since the signature was wrong. My grandmother died in 1961. When my mother went through the final statement, she found a check whose signature was not grandmother’s. I went to the bank and swore that “to the best of my belief and knowledge” it was not her signature and they refunded the money. They later found the thief who had been an attendant at the nursing my grandmother was at. But this was 62 years ago.
The difference here was that the check was written to me. It was the endorsement that was wrong. This is why banks generally don’t cash checks without putting an account number on it.
I won a ticket in the Oregon state lottery, not too big but too big to cash out where I bought it, I think it was $1500. They will only pay out around $600, so you either have to go to lottery headquarters or mail it in, so I mailed it.
You would thing that the payoff check would be sent descreetly. Nope. The pay check came in my mail in an envelope with bright red lettering saying it was from the Oregon State Lottery, with a clear address label showing my name and address and that there was clearly a check inside.