Mail theft a complex problem: Thieves ‘keep changing and evolving’

Nine days before Christmas, Henderson resident Katheryn Brown dropped two pieces of mail containing $75 worth of gift cards into her community’s outgoing mailbox near Boulder Highway and Racetrack Road.

The Trader Joe’s and Amazon gift cards were sent by Brown to her loved ones in California, but the cards never made it. Brown ultimately concluded the cards were stolen after reading hundreds of complaints on the social media app Nextdoor about missing or stolen mail in her zip code.

“This is an ongoing problem, and a big problem,” Brown said. “As the days went by and I kept checking (Nextdoor), the postings kept getting bigger and bigger from various people saying, ‘That’s what happened to me!’”

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service in Washington, D.C., confirmed it has received thousands of complaints about missing or stolen mail in Southern Nevada over the last 12 months.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the agency said 3,124 complaints about stolen or missing mail had been filed with the agency in the Las Vegas Valley since February 2021. Of those complaints, 506 were in Henderson, 2,364 were in Las Vegas and 254 were in North Las Vegas. And, 125 of those complaints were received in the first six weeks of 2022.

But at the same time, the Postal Inspection Service said it has no way of knowing if mail theft in Southern Nevada is on the rise. This is because mail theft statistics gathered by the agency prior to February 2021 “were not an accurate depiction” of the problem due to difficulties the agency has had in collecting and categorizing the complaints.

In Brown’s case, she decided not to report her mail stolen because she had nothing to prove that she had put the gift cards in the mail. She had no tracking number, and she had put the receipts for the gift cards inside the mail with them so that her relatives would have them if needed.

Checks weren’t in the mail

Jaki Baskow is a Henderson resident who runs a talent and speaking bureau business in the city. She said she had an experience similar to Brown’s when, in late 2021, she had multiple pieces of mail with checks in them go missing at the post office on Horizon Ridge Parkway.

“I was mailing my personal bills and also mailing talent checks to talent that work for us on commercials,” Baskow said. “They were calling me and saying they didn’t receive their checks.”

Baskow said she mailed out 27 checks, and “four of them never showed up.” Others took weeks to deliver, but none of the missing checks were cashed.

“I’ve had to reissue checks and resend them and stop payment,” Baskow said.

Like Brown, she did not report the missing mail to the post office, but she did warn others on Nextdoor.

Postal Inspector Trevor Hudson, who oversees theft investigations in the Las Vegas Valley, said the problem of mail theft is a complex one. The office investigates crimes ranging from the theft of mail from a mailbox to more advanced crimes like robberies of mail carriers and identity theft schemes.

“It ebbs and flows,” Hudson said. “One area that individuals are targeting, we will hit that hard, and they will move on to a different mode of stealing mail. They just keep changing and evolving.”

Recent mail crimes

Examples of recent mail crimes in Nevada include:

— Two mail carriers in the Summerlin area were victims of robberies in February. In one case, a female carrier was assaulted. In the second, a male carrier was threatened with a crowbar. The assailants were after the carriers’ mail keys, and Hudson’s office later released photos of them accessing nearby community postal boxes.

— A former postal carrier in Carson City pleaded guilty in February 2021 to stealing $30,000 worth of coins from five mail packages.

— In November 2020, a Las Vegas man pleaded guilty in federal court to robbing two mail carriers in the valley.

— A contract mail carrier for the postal service was sentenced in August 2020 to six months in prison for stealing mail in the Las Vegas Valley.

— There also have been multiple reports of theft of mail from community mailboxes. In May 2020, a large community mailbox was stolen from a southeast Las Vegas Valley neighborhood near Wigwam Avenue and Spencer Street.

On Tuesday, a federal jury in Las Vegas convicted Nosa Frank Obayando, 29, of mail theft and aggravated identity theft.

Authorities said he and a co-defendant carried out a scheme where mail belonging to over 300 victims was forwarded to the two men’s addresses without the victims’ knowledge. The men then used a debit card for a bank account opened in a victim’s name to withdraw at least $5,000 in cash from ATMs in the Las Vegas area.

On Nextdoor, many voice suspicion that postal employees, possibly temporary employees hired around the holiday season, are involved in the thefts in Henderson. Hudson believes this is a rarity.

“To be a postal employee, pay-wise and everything, it is a pretty good gig,” Hudson said. “They don’t want to risk losing that job and losing that pension. It is a very rare occasion where the employee is doing it.”

He also said the public plays an important role in preventing mail theft.

“For the most part, it is a pretty easy crime to prevent, especially with these neighborhood boxes,” he said. “Criminals that are stealing from them, prying them open, gaining access, are usually doing it in the cover of night. Less people around to see what they are doing.”

He said retrieving mail daily during daytime hours “leaves nothing in there for them to take.”

“Same thing for outgoing mail,” he said. “Don’t put it in at night and leave it sitting there.”

Contact Glenn Puit by email at gpuit@reviewjournal.com. Follow @GlennatRJ on Twitter.