UPDATED MAY 8, 2024
West Court experienced another incident of mailbox tampering on Saturday, May 4. This last occurred in early 2019, when mail was stolen from our cluster box units.
Mail theft is rampant nationwide, because thieves are stealing keys from postal service workers.
The US Postal Service is rolling out digital locks and other security measures. We don’t know when keyless mailbox clusters will become available here.
Here’s what you can do now to protect your mail:
Pick up your mail often. If you pick up your mail every day, there won’t be anything to steal overnight.
Use a curbside mailbox or stop by the post office to mail valuables.
Sign up for the USPS’s Informed Delivery so you will be notified by daily email about your letters and packages.
Never put a check, gift card, or item of monetary value in the outgoing mail drawer.
Tell your senders not to mail checks, gift cards, or items of monetary value to you. Find another way to take delivery of these items that are targeted by thieves.
If you go on vacation, put your mail on vacation hold, via www.usps.com.
UPDATED FEBRUARY 17, 2019
Added FRAUD ALERT notice at the bottom of this page.
UPDATED FEBRUARY 8, 2019
The USPS changed the locks on our mailboxes during the week of February 4. The idea was to install locks for which the thieves don't have keys. Hopefully, the new locks with thwart the thieves who, it appears, are still active on the peninsula. Despite the new locks, we still suggest that you follow the advice provided on January 8, section 3 below. The new normal may be that even sturdy, new mailboxes like ours are no longer secure.
UPDATED JANUARY 23, 2019
We suffered another round of mail theft earlier this week, so it appears there may be more mail thieves on the loose. Please continue to play good defense. We suggest you re-read the bullets under #3 below.
UPDATED JANUARY 14, 2019
The Mountain View Police Department just announced that they have made a series of arrests involving criminals who are believed to be responsible for a string of recent mail thefts in the local area. While it's too soon to know if these are the same thieves that are responsible for the mailbox thefts at West Court last week, their M.O. matches the description provided by the USPS mail carrier supervisor on La Avenida. Specifically, he noted that the thieves had made duplicates of the master panel key which enabled them to open the entire mailbox and clean out the mailbox very quickly. As you will read, the police said the thieves that were arrested in Mountain View had copies of mailbox master keys in their possession. Hopefully, this gang is the only such gang operating in the south bay area and the arrests will bring an end to the mailbox thefts.
As a reminder, see the bullets under #3 below to read what you can do in response to this problem.
POSTED JANUARY 8
As you may have heard or noticed some of the mailboxes – particularly the ones on the even side of the complex – have been penetrated by thieves, but all the mailboxes are vulnerable and nobody's mail is secure. Here are the details that our property manager gleaned from a conversation with a mail carrier supervisor on Tuesday, January 8:
Thieves have made keys to open the USPS master panel locks, the lock that is beside the outgoing mail slot which enables the mail carrier to load mail into all the individual slots or drawers at the same time. They started stealing mail in San Jose in mid-2018 and they are working their way up the peninsula.
Given that the master panel locks are still in the mailboxes and in working order, the post office will continue to put mail into individual mail slots, i.e., they will deliver mail as they normally do. While this may not make sense to you because the thieves can return and steal the mail again, from the USPS’s perspective they can’t suspend delivery to hundreds, if not thousands, of mail customers and have them picking up their mail at the local branches, e.g., Hope Street, etc.
The takeaway: the USPS will continue to put mail into West Court’s mailboxes, aka clusters, and here are their recommendations:
> pick up your mail every day (because the thieves work late at night)
> NEVER put a check in the outgoing mail slot. If you need to mail a check, put it in a USPS mailbox or mail it at Hope Street.
> if you are expecting a check, a credit card, or a valuable or sensitive item find another way to receive it as these are prime targets for thieves
> if you go on vacation, put your mail on vacation hold via the USPS’s website
> you can also sign up for USPS Informed Delivery, a service that enables you to view images of your mail and track packages
Long term, the post office hopes to replace the current locks with new, harder to penetrate locks, but they don’t expect this to be done until March.
If you are seeking information, the clerks at Hope Street may be able to provide some, but their source is the mail distribution facility on La Avenida, near the VTA bus yard. This is where the mail carriers are dispatched from so the local mail carrier is a better source of information if you can catch him or her when s/he is onsite. FYI, it is pointless to call La Avenida because they do not answer their phones.
Finally, we will provide updates on this web page and via posted notices as the situation develops.
According to the MVPD and other sources, mail thieves are exploiting the US Postal Service’s new Informed Delivery option to commit identity theft. Informed Delivery allows customers to digitally view all items in that day’s mail delivery.
HOW? Mail thieves use a name and address to sign up for Informed Delivery online, assigning their own e-mail address to the physical address. Then the thieves can monitor what mail is expected and selectively steal fraudulent credit cards they’ve ordered, checks and other valuables. They use this highjacking technique over and over to steal from many mailboxes.
WHAT TO DO: Protect your mail by signing up for Informed Delivery before thieves do. Go online to www.usps.com, click on “Quick Tools” then “Informed Delivery” to enroll. You will have to verify your identity online or in person at a US Post Office.
WHAT IF MY ADDRESS IS ALREADY COMPROMISED?
If you find that your address has already been enrolled in Informed Delivery without your knowledge, contact the Postal Inspector, aka the US Postal Inspection Service (the Federal law enforcement and security arm of the USPS) to file a report at: https://postalinspectors.uspis.gov/
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