Posts Tagged ‘post office’

Is the post office suffering from high crime?

Posted: June 24, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in crime
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I work as an instructor for a few companies, none of which reside in my local area. Whenever I finish a teaching gig, the company I taught for pays me, sometimes electronically, sometimes with a check. So naturally I was curious when I saw this headline the other day:

Now, reading a bit further (because I don’t trust any headline, and you shouldn’t either), I realized its NOT the Postal Service saying this, its instead a member of the Better Business Bureau. That person had good reason to say this, because she noted that check fraud jumped from 300,000 incidents to 680,000 incidents in 2021, despite Americans writing less checks every year.

From: https://goodmorningwilton.com/break-in-reported-at-wilton-post-office-outside-mail-box/

The issue doesn’t seem to be with residential mailboxes, but rather with the large, outdoor blue post boxes. Post boxes are being broken into at an alarming rate. In some cases, the criminals rob the postal worker to get the key to open the blue boxes. In other cases, they simple beat the boxes open with some blunt instrument. Once they get the checks, it’s not hard to erase the amount with a chemical solution and re-write the check for significantly more than was originally intended.

Checks are probably one of the few items to still be regularly mailed, and the post office was quick to note that its still safe (in their words) to mail checks:

“The Postal Service delivers about 130 billion pieces of mail over a year to 163 million customers,” said Paul Shade with the U.S.P.S. “It still remains the most secure way to transmit anything from any type of mailing.”

Paul Shade, USPS

The Post Office also noted it was installing high security boxes that are more difficult to break into.

There is a trend in the statistics. Going city by city, each “bubble” lists the incidents and arrests. Take a look at California:

Los Angeles: 54 incidents, 1 arrest
Oakland: 51 incidents, 4 arrests
San Francisco: 20 incidents, 2 arrests

And at Texas:

Houston: 97 incidents, 12 arrests
Dallas: 25 incidents, 2 arrests

Vs. Florida:

Miami: 15 incidents, 7 arrests
Tampa: 3 incidents, 3 arrests

Although I didn’t have full access to the data to calculate an arrest to incident ratio, I suspect that California would come out on the losing end of that calculation. Florida’s numbers are significantly lower than expected, and I’d reason its the fact that they make arrests and actually prosecute crimes. If you knew you could simply steal a bag of mail, cash a bunch of washed checks and face little to no chance of repercussion, well, why wouldn’t you?

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

The Post Office again shows why you should not be on Facebook

Posted: April 24, 2021 by ng36b in crime
Tags: , , , , ,

Well, no surprise, instead of actually delivering mail, the Postal Inspection Service is now worried about scanning for “inflammatory” content. Not actual crimes mind you, but people trying to protest or organize rallies. And not just any protests, like the “peaceful” protests last summer, but any that would be considered “right wing.”

I predict that not only will the USPIS (yup, that’s an acronym only the government can get behind) not find a whole lot, but it will simply drive people underground. It’s too easy to simply not use social media to organize, and if you’re really smart, you’ll organize using something like Signal, which actively makes fun of government organizations trying to break its code and encryption. Anyone using Facebook to organize is a fool and won’t last long.

I’m not a fan of government abusing authority to monitor for non-crimes, so here are a ton of resources you should use to keep the Postal Service’s “elite” force from spying on your non-COVID friendly BBQ:

  • Identity and Privacy Guide. Yup, its a government site. For SEALs. Because lots of foreign governments want to use social media to identify and influence Special Operators. So you can use the same guide they do for keeping their information safe.
  • NCIS Social Media Handbook. Not as cool as the TV show, but this guide helps you secure most of the privacy settings on popular social media.
  • Identity Force Blog. A good read for actual outlines of how bad things happen online.

Ironically, none of these cover Parler or Gab, both of which are considered bad places to be, or so Wikipedia told me, and I would trust Wikipedia to never, ever lie to me.

Here’s the reality. While stupid people will use social media to organize and commit crimes, those are easy to find. I’m more worried about the people with real skills organizing off social media. Those people could plot high end crimes that we’ll never see coming. Those are people like the Unabomber, who unlike the fools on Facebook actually killed people and was difficult to track down. These people will require actual focus, time and effort to track down and stop, and that’s exactly what we aren’t doing when we waste time scanning social media.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.