They target the U.S. Post Office’s “blue boxes” on street corners where people drop in their checks and letters. They break into mailboxes at town houses and apartment complexes. And they’ll pluck mail out of mailboxes at the end of driveways.
A new bill proposed in Maryland would go after the thieves who steal mail and checks by making it a crime to steal from U.S. mailboxes.
Tampering with mail is already a federal offense, but proponents of the bill in Maryland’s General Assembly, including several prosecutors, said the state needs another tool to go after a form of theft that often victimizes the elderly and other “vulnerable adults,” along with people in low-income neighborhoods.
Maryland Del. Jared Solomon, one of the sponsors of House Bill 318, said mail theft is something his constituents in Montgomery County have experienced firsthand. In some neighborhoods, he said, people don’t feel that their mail will be safe when dropped in a mailbox.
“We’ve had several mail carriers held up at gunpoint, where people want to steal the arrow keys, essentially the keys that lock a mailbox,” Solomon told WTOP.
Jason Shoemaker, with the Frederick County State’s Attorney’s Office, testified in support of the bill, explaining that the biggest losses tend to occur when checks are stolen and “washed.” Thieves use a chemical solution to strip off the ink, then make the checks out for larger sums of money, “with the losses ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars per stolen check.”
Doyle Niemann, a former Maryland State Delegate and prosecutor who works in the Prince George’s County State’s Attorney’s Office, said mail theft is a “real crime” with sometimes devastating consequences. He said in one case, thieves repeatedly hit mailboxes in the Dodge Park neighborhood of Prince George’s County using a stolen key that gave them access to rent checks.
“The result was people’s rents weren’t paid and a number of folks were evicted” because the landlord never got their checks. Niemann also said other neighborhoods saw a mail theft spike that “particularly happened at tax time.”
And for one Montgomery County prosecutor, the issue is personal.
Debbie Feinstein is chief of the Special Victims Division for the Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office. Feinstein is also co-chief of a unit that handles crimes against seniors and vulnerable adults, and her own parents were affected when their mail was stolen from a mailbox not far from their home.
“When I tell you the impact it had on my parents, I really can’t understate it,” Feinstein said, adding that the checks her parents dropped off in a blue mailbox in their neighborhood were each worth “thousands of dollars,” but there was another element to the crime.
“It was devastating for them to feel taken advantage of,” she told the House panel in Annapolis.
The offenses range from the theft of a piece of mail, to stealing an “arrow key” that opens post office boxes.
Proposed penalties are still under discussion but would be similar to those for counterfeiting and disclosure of the use of a credit card number.
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