JERSEY CITY, N.J. – Located on the corner of a picturesque block downtown this northern New Jersey city, it is able to serve the net from morning to night and in the rain, sleet and snow.
A mailbox from the Royal Blue American Postal Service.
For nearly two decades, a USPS collection box has been a status along Pavonia Avenue on Coles Street, safeguarding the valuable correspondence of countless residents.
But now some locals like it as an out paria.
“I stopped the checks in that mailbox,” Vinod Dadlani said.
“Never again, ” Paul Albasi.
Both men suffer from baffling and unsolved crimes. The checks they deposited at the checkout were stolen, exchanged and cashed.
The thief who succeeded with Dadlani’s check received $4,819.
Whoever took Albasi won $4,901.33.
In any case, the scammers inflated the dollar amount of the checks and wrote another call on the recipient’s line.
Dadlani and Albasi were given the cash back, but the ordeal took time and emotionally exhausted them and made them vulnerable to identity theft.
And they’re far from victims.
Many Jersey City citizens have had checks stolen in the past year, and thefts are limited to a singles mailbox. Checks were intercepted, exchanged and cashed after being placed in envelopes and deposited in at least two other nearby USPS collection boxes.
Crime is unique to Jersey City.
Boston doleading hit through a USPS box theft eruption in February. Approximately $200,000 in checks stolen from an outdoor collection box at a New Orleans postal workplace in the same month. And the stage has deteriorated so much in Peachtree City, Georgia, that police have warned citizens to avoid leaving their mail in the main collection box.
“It’s true that you don’t, stop, don’t, stop, block, stop, interrupt, freeze, finish, hit any mail you don’t need to borrow in the big blue outdoor mailbox of the U.S. post office located in Peachtree City,” the police posted on his Facebook page.
Thefts raise new questions about the security of the U.S. mail formula. At a time when the postal service is under scrutiny about its ability to move and protect mail order ballots for the 2020 presidential election. President Donald Trump has said that increased use of mail ballots would lead to fraud even though studies and reports have revealed that there is no widespread evidence of voter fraud in the United States.
Available knowledge recommends that thefts of USPS collection boxes, at least reported ones, be rare.
In recent years, the challenge has been concentrated in the Northeast. Nationwide, there were 2,881 reports last year from others who shipped illegally from collection boxes, to the knowledge of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service received as a component of a Freedom of Information Act application. More than 1,530 of them were in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Postal inspectors have won 1,395 reports across the country this year.
In Jersey City, some robbery victims have been looking to sound the alarm for months. But this is a wave of rare crimes: because those who suffer the most end up being cured (banks regularly reimburse in cash) the government has less incentive to track down thieves.
Many residents are, in fact, aware of the problem. Me too, until it happened to me.
Mail theft is as old as the postal service itself.
In 1793, a guy named Noah Webster, who would later be known for publishing the Webster Dictionary, was recruited through the postmaster to investigate a series of mail thefts between New York and Hartford, Connecticut.
Since the beginning of this century, mailboxes on sidewalks have noticed that their traffic is minimized thanks to email and online banking. But old habits, such as depositing a rent check or paying a water bill in the mail, are dead and collection boxes remain a hot target for enterprising thieves.
In 2016, mail theft reports began arriving in the New York Department of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, according to spokeswoman Donna Harris.
An investigation temporarily decided that the robberies were placed in mailboxes around the corner in the Bronx. It was discovered that the maximum bandits used a tactic known as mailbox fishing, in which they use home equipment to remove envelopes from collection boxes.
The “stem” is composed of a rope tied to a sticky rodent trap or a bottle coated with glue. Thieves place it on the folding lid of the box, roll it up and sift through its closure for money, checks or other valuables.
Washing ink from checks requires little clinical knowledge, according to experts, and can be done with regular family cleaning products. Criminals write a new call on the check and can replace the price with whatever they want.
To combat the problem, the postal service has changed the boxes on sidewalks in New York City to make them safer, Harris said.
But the settings didn’t work. The thieves still figured out a way to remove the mail, Harris said.
The postal inspectors, operating in conjunction with the NYPD, went to the charts to investigate and arrest the robbers. The strategy has worked, but it hasn’t solved the challenge either.
“We arrested more than a hundred people,” Harris said. “But we found out we weren’t going to stop us from getting out of the situation.”
The postal service has replaced its strategy: instead of devoting more resources to track down all bandits, it has focused on building a fish-proof mailbox.
The new devices were deployed in the New York-New Jersey domain in early 2019. No more folding lids exploited by thieves. They were replaced through a small opening large enough to hold an envelope, giving the sidewalk mailbox the feel of a safe.
“We like the Cadillac of mailboxes, ” said Harris.
The postal service is spending between $700 and $1,200 to upgrade old boxes with Cadillacs, according to George Flood, a postal service spokesman. It charges between $4.9 million and $8.4 million to upgrade the 7,000 boxes in New York in.
Shortly after arriving in New York, flight reports dropped, Harris said.
But the stage was in Jersey City. Mailboxes in the Hamilton Park area, where citizens have reported thefts, are all the latest models designed to thwart fishing in mailboxes.
So how do you do the robberies?
Gregory Kliemisch, the leading inspector of the department’s Newark division, who oversees Jersey City, refused to raise questions about the incidents.
“We are evasive because we have anything to hide,” Kliemisch said. “But in the chart of an investigation, there is sensitive data that can compromise the total situation.”
Thefts raise awkward questions for a federal company that is already in monetary difficulty.
Do mailbox Cadillacs look more like jalopies?
Or is it work?
Tom Gibbons, a genuine real estate agent, lives across the street from pavonia Avenue’s mailbox.
He has begun to suspect in recent years after several Netflix DVDs he left in the box, a pre-Cadillac style, were unsuccessful at his destination. Gibbons said he went to inspect the box one day last summer and couldn’t figure out what he had discovered.
“I opened the lid and got to the inner and back edge of the lid absolutely sticky,” he said.
Gibbons soon identified what “double-sided adhesive tape” means, he says. “Actually, there’s an envelope stuck.
Gibbons said he contacted the postal service. A few months later, the box was replaced with one of the last ones designed to be safer.
“I think it will solve the problem,” Gibbons said.
But in April, he deposited an envelope in the mailbox containing a check for $272 to pay his water bill. He took out his cell bank account a day or two later and saw a transaction that alarmed him: a check worth about $5,000.
Gibbons called his bank and emailed him a copy. The water company call is gone. In his charge the call of a user he did not know: Brianna Pearl Watson.
The amount has also been changed: the $272 has been erased. The price of the check is now $4,868.56.
Gibbons reported it to the police and the postal service. He then wrote an article about his terrible experience on Nextdoor hyperlocal social media.
Within days, more than a hundred more people had published answers, many of which shared stories with their own.
“I was surprised to see the answer, ” said Gibbons.
One of the other people who posted corey Eisenstein, who was not a victim once or twice.
Eisenstein was planning a wedding to his then-fiancée Kate Goss in March 2019 when he deposited a $5,000 check in the mail to book the room by email. About six weeks later, a local contacted him and asked when he planned to send the deposit.
Eisenstein was … the check had already been cashed. But when he and Goss posted the check symbol online, they unduly suspected that something was wrong.
The area where he had written the call of the place, a farm in Hudson Valley, New York, now had a call they did recognize: Peter T. Pinckney.
They contacted the post and asked if anyone with that call was running there.
“They said they had never heard of him,” Eisenstein recalls. “And now he panicked because we didn’t know if we were going to have our room, and we didn’t have any money.”
Eisenstein and Goss also ran out of words about why the check was cashed in the first place. The name, Peter T. Pickney, was the only segment to be replaced and hardly looked at anything to write elsewhere on the check.
He and his wife spoke to the check issuer, Chase Bank, and told him that an investigation would be opened and that a resolution would be made on the fly of the missing budget within 30 days, according to Eisenstein. On the 30th, the bank informed them that he would return the money, Eisenstein said.
Eisenstein said he submitted a report to the Jersey City Police Department and the Postal Service. He informed agencies that he had deposited the check in the mailbox on Monmouth Avenue on Seventh Street, less than two blocks from the Pavonia Avenue box.
“This is the biggest check we’ve ever had to mail, and it turned out to be stolen,” Eisenstein said. “At first, we didn’t know if it was taken out of the mailbox.”
If they had taken it out of the box, the couple soon had an explanation as to why this would not happen again.
The mailbox was replaced one or two months later through the more secure model. He and Goss got married in September and started sending their rent checks there.
They put the separate checks in an envelope – they make a percentage of the rent – and mail it per month. But in January, the couple’s landlord told them he had never earned his November rent payment.
Eisenstein checked his bank account and saw that the check had never been cashed. Goss checked his and saw that this was the case. The owner’s call is missing. In your charge the call of Richard William Kleine.
“It was terrifying, ” said Goss. “I couldn’t get him back down.”
The couple went to Chase’s branch to report what happened. When the cashier told them where the check had been cashed, they were surprised.
It’s not a check exchange shop in a hole in the wall. It’s a bank. The same bench they were sitting on, actually.
The couple remember asking the cashier a question: doesn’t that mean you’d have that user on video?
“Our interest in who cashed the check didn’t seem to be something they sought to satisfy,” Eisenstein said. “They said they would manage it internally.”
The cash eventually returned to Goss’s account. Since then, the couple stopped sending checks from one of the boxes in the neighborhood.
A Chase spokeswoman showed that the $1,000 check had been cashed at one of its locations. The user who charged him presented two IDs: a North Carolina driver’s license and a signed ATM card.
“After the investigation, we demonstrated that the client’s signature on the disputed checks fit the client’s signature on the previous legal checks or what we have in our files,” she said. “The letter and format of the check were in line with any of our consumers’ previous checks, and the consumer earned a credit on their account.”
But the spokeswoman said she could provide any data about the user who charged her.
Gibbons also received his cash refund. He said he didn’t perceive why thieves took so long to get caught.
“It’s just a matter of devoting resources to investigate this problem,” Gibbons said. “Install a camera or position there. This doesn’t seem complicated to solve, especially when it’s so ubiquitous.”
Eisenstein’s questions of utmost urgency relate to the role of banks.
“Wouldn’t it be very undeniable for them to identify other people in the other aspect of those checks cashed?” He said. “Or is it as undeniable as creating a fake bank account, taking out the cash once the check is cleared, ending the account, and getting away with it?”
When I walked to the Pavonia Avenue mailbox on April 13, I had no idea what had happened to Gibbons, Eisenstein and others.
I slid an envelope with a check for $2,991.83 inside through the small slot and went home. The cash check owed to a former tenant who had just left my family’s basement.
The next afternoon, my wife looked up from her computer with an alarm look on her face. “Who is Diamond Alexis Jones?” She asked.
I had no idea. It wasn’t the call from our former tenant, not even close.
“He sent you one for almost $3,000, ” said my wife.
I don’t do what I said at the time, but I’m sure I ran to his computer, his frozen face, looking to find out what had happened.
I had forgotten the check I had deposited in the mail the day before. But he came back to me when I saw the scan on his screen.
The check itself looked like the one I had sent. He had the Bank of America badge in between and our bank account numbers at the bottom. But the only letter that matched mine was the signature.
What highlighted the most was the message on the “for” line: “Spending COVID,” he said.
I without delay calling my bank to report the fraud. I said the cash would be refunded, but I didn’t foolishly insist that they freeze the account.
Three days later, a new check gave the impression of our online account. It costs $6,421.11 and was paid to a “Taryell” (NBC News keeps his last name). It looked like a Bank of America check, but it looked like it belonged to a business entity that bore my last name, “Prosperity Schapiro LLC,” the words above read.
The words on the check were written in computer characters, with the exception of the signature, which looked like mine but wasn’t accurate.
I called the bank and closed the account. Once back, the cash returned.
I also filed a report over the phone with the postal inspectors. I gave him a claim number and told him someone would follow me. Four months later, I’m still waiting for to be joined.
When I reported what had happened at my local police station, I without delay discovered that the challenge was well known to Jersey City law enforcement.
“You’re the only one, ” told me an officer. “There’s a lot going on here.”
He passed me a piece of paper with a phone number to call and record an official report. I did it the same day and I spoke to an operator who wrote down the main points of what had happened and told me he was hoping to hear a detective.
A few hours later, I won a call from a Jersey City police officer. After explaining what happened, he said there is no explanation for why to register a police report if he had already registered it with the postal service.
“It would already be the investigation, ” he said.
My conversations with Bank of America have been more revealing. A spokesman said the first check processed at a Bank of America, either at an ATM or via an electronic deposit. The timing of a PNC Bank through one of those same methods.
In the case of the first check, the spokesman said, the fraud was so temporarily reported that the bank rejected the transaction before the perpetrators were delivered with the money. But the Bank of America spokesman said he may simply not provide any information about the account holder or what action, if any, would be taken.
PNC Bank responded to requests for comment.
After reporting the thefts, none of the parties involved (the bank, the postal inspectors, the Jersey City police) had given me any indication that they were actively looking to locate the person stealing my checks.
So I have to make a little effort myself.
There are several women in the U.S. called Diamond Jones who have an average initial that starts with the letter “A”, however, there is only one user nationwide with the first call Taryell and the surcall that gave the impression on the stolen check. , based on online log searches.
He is 22 years old and lives in Florida, according to him.
Before I contacted her, I sought to perceive the scenarios imaginable. Could you be sure this Taryell was a player willing in the crime?
Turns out not.
“She may be a victim herself, ” told me a former postal inspector.
Criminals involved in mail theft are known to open bank accounts with stolen identities. In other cases, fraudsters smuggled cash through accounts they had access to without account holders knowing. It is also possible, experts say, that the names on the changed checks were completely invented.
After 8 men were charged with bank fraud and mail theft in 2017 for allegedly stealing mailboxes in the Bronx and then in the United States. Attorney Preet Bharara detailed the myriad of tactics criminals used in the banking formula for cash checks.
“In iterations of the system, those bank accounts belonged to unsuspecting mail thieves, account holders, or third parties whose debit cards or non-public identification data were stolen,” Bharara said at the time.
Taryell’s phone numbers weren’t good. I still joined his grandmother who lives in the area. He listened patiently as I described to him what was happening to me, but he was unable to provide much help. Grandma said Taryell had recently replaced her number and didn’t know how to touch her.
“I don’t know how he ended up calling on his check,” his grandmother told me, “but I’m glad you got the cash back.”
Some of the victims I spoke to received information about where the checks were changed and what was being done, if anything, to take out the scammers. But others said they had remained almost absolutely in the dark.
“Banks don’t need this to happen,” said Kevin Streff, managing spouse of Secure Banking Solutions, a security consulting firm founded in South Dakota. “They don’t need anyone to know that check fraud is being transmitted under their supervision. For $6, 000, they’re hiding it under the carpet.”
Streff said the most complicated thieves know that if they are tempted to massively inflate the amounts of the checks, they have a smart chance of evading the government and avoiding a significant reaction from the banks.
“With the existing point of regulation, law, and policy, those bad guys would possibly remain below certain thresholds and not motivate a bank to do anything about it,” he added.
The question remains: how can thieves seize mail from new pre-collecting boxes in the first place?
The inspectors commented. Neither is the postal service.
Mailbox manufacturer Steel Craft Corp., based in Wisconsin, has questions for the postal service.
“In terms of power and performance, they are designed and manufactured by USPS to their specifications,” said the company’s president and CEO, Tom Verbos.
I spoke to a handful of postmen in my community to hear your opinion. Most wondered aloud if any of their own could have a bully.
“With those new mailboxes, now it’s to get the mail out,” said one postman who spoke on anonymity for fear of reprisals for talking to a reporter. “Unless it’s someone inside.”
Another postman told me that he was aware of the reports and warned that thieves or thieves might have been handed hands on one of the keys that opened the blue collection boxes.
“I don’t know if they got a key or something, but other people are complaining too,” the postman said in a mailbox several blocks from Pavonia Avenue.
On a hot, sunny day last month, I met a veteran postman who has been running in Jersey City for many years. When I explained the eruption of the flights, the expression on his face darkened.
He also speculated that the bandits had a connection to the postal service.
“Personally, if I see this done, I’ll report it,” he says. “Because that’s my job. I need to run the postal service.”
He said he had been running there for decades and now in the twilight of his career.
“I’m going to retire proudly, ” he said, “knowing that the formula is going to last a long time.”