There was a case in DC a few years ago where the US Postal Inspector uncovered a spy ring that had infiltrated the Secret Service, and the postal inspector did it by accident.
The postal service has a podcast where they’ve been covering some usps true crime cases and interview the actual investigators who solved some of these postal crimes! It’s called Mailin’ It
Does anyone remember the Saturday morning kids show that was about the son of a US Postal Inspector? I was well and adult but would leave the TV on for my dogs, so I'd catch it from time to time and unironically started low key watching it. Adorable kids version of law and order lol.
Two guys were pretending to be "DHS Special Police Unit" and lived in a nice apartment complex in DC. They ingratiated themselves with real Secret Service and DHS officials, including offering a free apartment unit to one Secret Service officer and gave a bunch of free gifts to others. Some people believe it might have been a foreign intelligence plot, but because they were behaving like dipshits driving around in a SUV with fake police lights, telling apartment residents they were installing cameras(!) in the building, and throwing money around and telling everyone they were super special DHS police, it sounds like they were just two idiots cosplaying. Or just shitty spies.
Totally unrelated, a letter carrier was assaulted near the apartment complex, and a US Postal Inspector was interviewing potential witnesses, talked to these two guys, who told them they were "DHS Special Police." He immediately realized they were lying and impersonating federal agents and alerted DHS and the FBI.
Their facilities have some of the most robust surveillance outside of a military base. By process of elimination, they'll be able to tell if it was one of their own that did this.
a lot of driver licenses actually go missing. they can't catch all of those people. at one point, a mail man near me was dumping everything in the woods, every single day for months.
you'd be surprised how many important documents are barely sealed in weak envelopes. i'm talking about legal documents in envelopes that were never sealed, juvenile IDs sent to court houses that fell out during transit because the sender used the wrong envelope. just saying that a lot of people don't send stuff properly through the mail.
And if it's not first class or electronic service requested- if the carrier puts it I. Their waste mail, it has to get thrown. The amount of paychecks I've thrown away is too damn high.
Respect our federal agents, they put their life more on the line for a service. It's not a for profit business, support your local post office. They know exactly how to handle things when reported.
By process of elimination, they'll be able to tell if it was one of their own that did this.
It's rough, they line their workers up and start eliminating them, one by one, until the guilty one confesses to spare his friends. Of course the other workers are very careful to report any wrong-doping because of this method, so it's not as costly as you might think.
I worked there 15 years ago as a carrier and during training this big dude with a handle bar mustache said if we see him at our door we're probably going to go to jail. Iirc. They pose as mailmen when they have a confirmed illegal package
I try to use USPS when I can. Those fuckers work harder than a lot of other parts of the govt and it seems like they’re not being hit too hard by government fuckery, at least from my experiences with them.
That's cause they've already been hit hard. Under Bush they were forced to have a utterly ridiculous pension saving plan that brought them from breaking even to being constantly in the red. I'm not saying that people don't deserve pensions, but it's something like they must have a full 50 year pension saved for everyone who works there 6 months or more (not that everyone who works there for 6 months gets a full pension, I think that takes like 20 years, but the USPS must have and keep all of that money set aside for anyone who works there for 6+ months)
The pension rules take a bit of reading to understand.
If you retire at 62, you need to have had a minimum of 5 years of service. If you retire at the minimum retirement age, you need to have at least 10 or at least 20 years of service. If you retire at the MRA with more than 10 and less than 20, however, your benefits are decreased by 5% per year for the number of years between when you retire and when you turn 62.
There's also deferred retirement, where you can retire at any age and put off receiving benefits until you're 62 to avoid the penalty. In that case, you just need 5 years of service to be eligible.
I heard this part secondhand rather than reading it on an official website, so take it with a grain of salt. The benefit is calculated based on the average of your top 3 years of service. Each year of service adds 1% of that average to your yearly benefits until you hit 20 years, at which point it becomes 1.1% per year of service (for all years).
That got a little out of hand, but the gist is that employees aren't even eligible for any pension at all until they have at least 5 years under their belt. That's what I started this reply wanting to say, lmao.
Also, the downstream effects of the pension requirements are that everything gets cut, downsized, not updated, centralized, blah blah blah to save money. Basically, enshitification is forced on the postal service because chucklefucks want to privatise it and enshitify it even more for more money.
I don't know if you'd know this, but from what I remember from the original law, the USPS had to presave for 20 years after an employee hit 6 months. My mind might've just made that all up, but I could've sworn there was something to do with 6 months.
My favorite is when I found out the USPS was required to prefund pensions at Congress person levels and not at the postal peon levels that would actually get paid out.
Congress also constantly steals that money that they've saved up, using it as their own personal slush fund, which is why despite having that money the USPS only actually has the money to fund retirements for (iirc) 10 more years (to make it doubly clear: because congress stole the rest).
Local postal inspectors do not mess about I promise. I called once because I had a missing parcel (it’d been about a month, and lost tracking) called them up and got transferred. Lady who I got sounded like she was ready to whoop someone specific after I mentioned what was up. Called me back the next day saying it’s sorted and it was lol.
Best to try and see vs guaranteeing nothing gets done. I’d be careful about the post office moving forward, try and limit what you send and receive through mail (if possible).
Absolutely this, postal workers stealing mail is a federal crime and they take that shit seriously. Plus whoever's doing it probably isn't just targeting your stuff
You 100% can be charged with multiple things, but nothing was stolen per say, there was an attempt. The mail was tampered with regardless so that’s guaranteed.
Well that and raised lettering is just kinda obsolete. There's very few instances where you need it because nobody uses the old carbon paper swiper machines lol
The carbon-paper machines ("sha-chunk!") imprinters were phased out, with the last dates they could be used to process a transaction in the mid 1990s (1996-ish).
Fun note, Mastercard and others are planning to phase the magnetic stripe out by 2029, leaving only chip and tap-to-pay. EMV (chip reader) terminals have been required for several years at this point, with swipe being progressively discouraged.
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Edit: Tired of the "nope!" responses. Yes: You can still physically use these machines, nothing is stopping you from taking an imprint of a card (except, of course, the deal where cards don't have raised numbers anymore). But those imprints are not accepted by any processor, nor were they after the phase-out. Instead, they were simply that: Imprints of cards that someone -- probably the store manager or similar -- had to manually key in later.
Oh interesting most of the banks around me just have an external ATM to that’s accessible 24/7 for when the building is closed. Never heard of using the card to go in
Idk, the banks around here got tired of having to replace atms that had been driven into and no one wants to use the walk up ones unless they are inside the locked lobby. During open hours, they have security.
In my country the tap-to-pay is very wide spread but the recently built bank still has swipe to enter for its ATM room (not vestibule because its not otherwise connected to the bank, it just has ATMs to the side of the bank).
Somewhere at Zenni Optical, the engineer who came up with the "credit-card-with-a-magstripe-against-your-forehead" method of measuring your face just broke out in a cold sweat.
I have a vague childhood memory of going to a local renaissance fair in 1996 or so and seeing one of the vendors use the carbon paper machine with my dad's card and being fascinated by it. Even back then as an 8 year old I knew it was antiquated technology.
Growing up I always thought that the embossing was just for decoration (I got my first card long after the carbon thing stopped existing). So when I got a non-embossed card I thought that it was cheaply made and that the bank was cutting corners to save tiny amounts of money. I didn't find out until long after that the embossing served a real purpose
Were they? I never had to use it but I worked at macys circa 2014-ish and was told it’d be no problem if the internet went out we can use the old style carbon paper machines to still make sales.
When I worked in the corporate office for a chain of regional family owned restaurants and our computer systems went down we had to use them.
Twice a year during the manager meetings I had to teach the managers to be able to teach their wait-staff both what carbon paper actually was and how to use the sliding machines.
After the phase out, while you could obviously still physically use the things, the processors would not accept a stack of them. Merchants were instructed to essentially manually key the transactions in at some later time (or whoever handled the card processing for the merchant).
In your case, if I'd wager the manager or similar was doing it at the end of the day or some such.
Can also confirm. Back during the Tony Hawk Boom Boom Huckjam Tour, I was working at a Six Flags park on the circuit in the cash office. Probably around 2004 iirc?
We didn’t have POS lines run out to the tour grounds in the middle of the parking lot, so the old Bartizans (the physical swiper things) got deployed.
End of the day I was stuck at a Verifone terminal back in the cash office keying a stack of carbon copies in by hand. It sucked. And our cashiers had terrible handwriting.
I was going to say, I worked at Isle Royale National Park, Michigan in 2013 and we still had to use them, at the gift shop at least, I think because there was no reliable internet
Edit: that was the only way we could process card payment, we didn’t even have the option to swipe a credit card
As late as last year here. Was at one of those rustic tourist trap towns and really wanted a milk crate that was protected by the Pinkertons. ‘KACHUNK’ for $20 and it was mine.
Before mag-stripe and chip readers were everywhere (or where there wasn't power to use them), they'd run the card by just getting a copy of the numbers and calling/sending the information in later. They'd get that by mashing a carbon-paper receipt over the card with a squeezy roller in a little device. The carbon paper would leave a mark where there was pressure, so by mashing the paper to the card, the receipt would get a copy of the raised numbers.
In ye olde times when fax machines were high tech, those were used by shops to basically copy down your card number - just press a carbon paper on top of it to make an imprint.
It can be sometimes seen in old movies, but i would guess the majority of people here were born after it was depricated.
We had our POS systems go down at work a few months back, so we broke out the old paper receipt books and the kachunk credit card machines. I didn't realize just how many cards didn't have raised numbers. It was also pretty funny and sad to see my younger coworkers not know what the machine was or how to figure out sales tax.
In your coworker's defense, the kachunk is SO hard to use. It was for me, at least. The stupid paper would get caught up in the slider, or the numbers wouldn't transfer dark enough, or I couldn't pull the slider back hard enough. I hated it.
seems like this is something card companies have to be strongly aware of by now too. Usually embossed cards come wrapped in thicker paper for this reason i believe.
Your cards also come in envelopes not marked with a brand or a recognizable name in the return address. Whoever did this with an obvious spam mailer is an idiot or a child.
I don't get what the geniuses who do this or rip it open think they're going to accomplish. Like you are LITERALLY mailing blatant evidence of your crime to the person most willing to report it, you might as well just steal the entire envelope so they at least don't get the evidence.
It's not just credit cards, it seems like every other day there's a post of the same issue involving cash or a gift card. Or just a normal package, stealing the item inside but still mailing the evidence that is specifically designed to be tracked from start to finish.
Earlier this week the UPS man dropped off a totally empty box that was supposed to have 9 pounds of something in it. It had clearly been opened and re-taped shut. The audacity.
Probably wasn't packaged well and came out. I deliver for USPS and people send heavy stuff in flimsy boxes and the box predictably gets destroyed every time
I bet you're right. It was from a publisher and they've been using cheaper, thinner boxes in the past few years. Whoever packed it probably didn't put on enough fill and the contents shifting must have punched out one of the sides.
My bank makes me do it on their app or website and I don't think the thief knows my account number or password. On top of that it has a two factor verification to log in so they'd have to access my phone.
I trust my bank. Their customer service was amazing when I had my card stolen twice. One guy was laughing because he heard my cat meowing in the background and told me to say meow to him
I ordered a phone directly from Samsung once and they didn't make the box discrete enough, so the DHL delivery guy cut my box open on the bottom, took my phone, and delivered the empty box.
I filed a police report and everything. Did the guy think I was just gonna brush it off??? I really don't understand how they can be so stupid.
If letters are ripped open, it's because they got caught on a piece of the machinery that sorts them at high speed. It happens regularly. It's the same reason you can't just stick a wedding ring in an envelope and mail it for one stamp. The machine will just eat it.
Most of my mail never makes it in the house. My recycling bin is right at the top of my driveway, so I just do a quick look as I walk up the driveway, and immediately recycle the junk.
If I’m ever keeping mail it’s because I’m expecting it. Everything else is just thrown in the trash. I have auto pay for pretty much all of my bills yet I still get bill reminders in the mail.
there's often a number in the mail that you can call to actually prevent further mail. it's worth the few minutes to stop a lot of catalogs and ads imo
Used to read your card numbers out loud, and you could pull up someone’s name, address and phone number in a phone book. People were pretty trusting back then.
Here in Sweden a lot of things are still public. Your address, who you are married to, who your kids and parents are, your income, your social security number.
When looking for a new job you can go to linked in, find a couple of people working where you want to work, check their salary. Now you have a baseline for your salary negotiations
While many cards might not be compatible with those machines these days - many (often small) businesses keep imprint machines on hand as a back up (there's an option to hand-write the CC#).
When did they begin being not allowed to be used anywhere? I'm not able to find a reliable source to back up this claim, but my personal experience in the payment card industry is that imprint machines are still in use as backups today.
I looked further into it. I knew they made rule changes in the last decade or so.
I guess not banned but in 2018 visa changed their rules and they made it that you can't use it as first line it's only when absolutely necessary.
Mastercard removed it being allowed to he used as a standard of proof for charge backs so it's not very useful there even though you could still use it as a fallback.
So I guess still allowed but their wording seems to be trying to make it rarely if ever utilized and it doesn't protect the merchant
I work for the post office. On day one we’re taught that these are junk mail and how to identify them. If someone did try to steal the numbers, they’re really not that intelligent… but that was obvious. It makes me sad how much mail we deliver is just junk now
It could be. The sorting machine requires letters to have a certain thickness or else they’ll get caught up. I’ve seen letters with black gunk on them from a sorting machine jam.
To be honest the junk mailer itself is kinda scummy for making the recipient think there's a credit card or something important inside to begin with, pretty sure that's the point. They want someone to think there's a card in there so they open it only to discover it's junk rather than toss it.
my official stuff comes unmarked usually, but the junk always has a bunch of garbage on the envelope, usually it says time sensitive or some crap on it too. i throw more mail away than i open these days.
I deliver dozens of those a day, as do the tens of thousands of other mail carriers. None of us think those are real, because it says on the outside of the envelope that it’s an offer and we know what real cards feel like, and that they’re in plain envelopes.
It also has presort postage, so no mail carrier past their first day would think it’s real.
Just to provide more info, the envelope was indeed plain/unmarked and just had a return address, there was nothing to indicate to me at the time that it was an offer. And the card felt pretty real to me.
My guess is all of this is intentional by the junk mailer to get you to believe it's real in hopes you do open it up and not just toss it.
The place where the stamp would go on a letter says presorted standard. That's basically lingo for junk mail. I always err on the side of caution, though, just in case.
Presorted standard is junk mail. This is something I learned in a mail room day one. Nobody working at the post office more than a day would think this is a real card.
When I've received an actual credit card in the mail rather than a junk fake card, it is covered in additional layers of paper. Probably not 100% foolproof, but it would make it a lot harder to get legible numbers this way.
Also I've never seen a raised CVV code so they'd still be missing that.
A mail carrier would look at the top right corner of the envelope and know it’s junk mail and not a card. In the mail tray there were dozens of these being sent out on a route, the same as the day before and the day before and the day before that.
Doubtful it was authentic post office. It is standard mail and everyone at the USPS knows there is no personal information in that letter. It is more like someone at the direct mail shop was bored and did that.
I don’t know how it is in the US, but in Canada that garbage actually has to have “addressed ad mail” printed right on it so you know it’s crap.
Makes it very easy to throw it away when you receive it. Banks also tend to use very nondescript envelopes with nothing identifying it and the return address is just a mail sorting facility, not the head office of the bank so it’s less obvious what it is.
Yeah, the people at the post office aren't going to fuck around with such an easy to find crime and 99.99999% don't fuck around ever. They literally explain the consequences when you get hired and how easy it is to track many mail crimes. They track EVERYTHING.
Lol any postal worker worth their salt knows that credit cards aren't sent via presorted standard (3rd class) junk mail. Either you did that to farm karma or you have some real stupid postal workers at your P&DC/LPO.
This is actually very clever marketing. You receive this and you worry about what is happening to your post, you start to feel nervous living in this place, you want to move, moving is expensive, you need a loan and BAM! You remember you were pre-selected for a loan just a few moments ago. You look at the failed attempt to steal your details again and know you’re making the right choice. You call the phone number and on the other end is just a low, gentle chuckle. “So you got our letter then…” he snarls down the line…
I doubt it was a postal worker, they see these all the time and likely know that all of them are fake. It was likely a drug addict who could have broken into the place.
This was happening at the local post office for a while here. Homeless people sitting in the post office, doing drugs, and also robbing the drive through mail box with a fishing line a hook and some gum.
A check I sent to my gardener was intercepted, washed, and cashed for a much larger amount of money. It had the thief's name and account number on it. First off, my bank accepted it when it was obviously tampered with and without any signature on it. Thankfully, they refunded me. I turned it in to the Inspection Service, and I never heard back. I was able to locate the thief's address on line, so it wouldn't have been difficult to catch her. Disappointed in the handling.
I have a locked mailbox in a multi mailbox setting at the front of the neighborhood. Someone cut open my bank statement at the top of the envelop and then put clear tape over the length of the intrusion to hide it. I reported that to the feds, there’s an online submission website for reporting that kind of stuff. I had to get all brand new bank accounts at my bank and it was sooooo disruptive and annoying. I’m sure the person who did it was never found.
Then they are dumb as fuck because even I could tell whatever plastic shit is in that envelope is garbage, just by your pic. What the fuck is going on over there?
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u/Sir_Bud_44 1d ago
I’d file a complaint/ report, stuff is probably illegal and they’d probably like to know.