{"id":70330,"date":"2023-10-08T20:48:22","date_gmt":"2023-10-09T00:48:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ifintechworld.com\/news\/why-you-should-be-worrying-about-the-rise-in-check-fraud-and-thieves-stealing-your-mail\/"},"modified":"2023-10-08T20:48:26","modified_gmt":"2023-10-09T00:48:26","slug":"why-you-should-be-worrying-about-the-rise-in-check-fraud-and-thieves-stealing-your-mail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ifintechworld.com\/?p=70330","title":{"rendered":"Why You Should Be Worrying About The Rise In Check Fraud And Thieves Stealing Your Mail"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

I didn\u2019t think thieves would be so brazen to steal mail. After all, it\u2019s a federal crime. Yet an increasingly amount of theft is occurring where checks are stolen from mail.<\/p>\n

Checks stolen from snail mail are not difficult to perpetrate. It\u2019s easy to spot a standard envelope containing a check. Thieves then rip the check out of the envelope, change the payee to themselves or create new fake checks.<\/p>\n

I know how they work since this happened to me while I was managing my father\u2019s estate after he died several years ago. When my banker called me to ask if I had cashed a check in Maryland (where I don\u2019t live and hadn\u2019t been), I told him to call the police and close the account.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, the banker\u2019s quick action prevented the loss of money from my father\u2019s account. I wasn\u2019t responsible for the stolen check and I immediately reported it to my local police department. My bank immediately flagged the incident for their fraud division. I signed an affidavit attesting to the fraud for the bank and I was on my way.<\/p>\n

Lately I\u2019ve seen reports of robbers taking the \u201cmaster keys\u201d of apartment mail boxes from postal delivery workers so that they can rifle through mail for checks. This kind of crime is not abating, according to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the U.S. Treasury (FinCen).<\/p>\n

<\/fbs-ad><\/p>\n

\u201cDespite the declining use of checks in the United States, criminals have been increasingly targeting the U.S. Mail since the COVID-19 pandemic to commit check fraud,\u201d FinCen reported in an alert earlier this year.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe US Postal Service (USPS) delivers nearly 130 billion pieces of U.S. Mail every year to over 160 million residential and business addresses across the United States. From March 2020 through February 2021, the USPIS received 299,020 mail theft complaints, which was an increase of 161% compared with the same period a year earlier.\u201d<\/p>\n

How do you do avoid this growing fraud? This is what the US Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) suggests:<\/p>\n