Mail Theft Again

[Zema Bus]

Mail theft has been a constant problem in this area (and all over the country really from what I've read) since the pandemic. Thieves either get a hold of the master keys to the cluster boxes (one key opens them all) or they just brute force them open. They rarely catch these guys and when they do they just release them quickly so they can go right back to stealing mail. I used a mail scanning and forwarding company for a while because of it, looks like I'll have to do that again, only this time it's going to be permanent. I don't get all that much mail, and for most of it it's enough to just get a scanned PDF. Anything I need physical procession of I can have forwarded to me via UPS or FedEx. Today when I went down the street to get my mail there was a printout from USPS taped to it saying that someone had forced open the cluster box and broke the lock such that they can't open it. That's happened before and they eventually fixed it, but this time they're saying to pick it up at the post office. I don't want to drive 20 mins to the post office and stand in line so I'll just do what I did before. And here I was concerned with moving to an unincorporated area in AZ because of the lack of mail delivery

[Grogan]

Pretty soon it's going to be shithole-everywhere, so Arizona will be as good a place as any

Our postal service has been on strike for months, so I can't get anything. I don't rely on it for anything, except that right now it means I can't get my driver's license and health card renewals etc. (though I have temporary proof of renewal).

[Zema Bus]

Yeah the coming Trump depression is going to make this a lot worse.

[Grogan]

In his last term, Trump put Louis DeJoy in place, to sabotage the postal system to thwart mail-in voting and sabotage the postal service to make the case for privatization. DeJoy is entrenched in courier service money, so this is dirty. Immediately he started scrapping perfectly good mail sorting machines, they filled a big yard, rusting away. The president can't even fire the postmaster general once instated, it takes a tribunal and convincing them is hard, you have to prove malicious intent. Ironically, this was to insulate the postal service from politics.

Imagine what this asshole is going to be empowered to do now.

[Zema Bus]

So I was looking at a house in AZ with Google Street View, and I think I saw a mail thief stealing packages from a cluster box that was forced open to expose everyone's mail and parcels.Somehow I don't think this was a postal employee. I moved around in Street View to see multiple snap shots in time and zoomed in when I was too far away. Looks like he spent a lot of time there grabbing packages and putting them in his SUV. He didn't even bother waiting until after dark.

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MailThief3.jpg (72.34 KiB) Viewed 33019 times

[Grogan]

Hahah... it's funny, the things Google Street and Satellite view catches by coincidence. That could have been any time within the last few years though.

[Zema Bus]

Yeah no telling when that was other than that it was within the last two years or so since the house I was looking at was built in 2022.

[Zema Bus]

I was talking with one of my former coworkers who recently moved to AZ, and she said in her area (same general area where this was but closer to Phoenix) the carriers use their own cars and dress in regular clothes, so maybe that's all this was. I've never heard of such a thing, I thought they were always required to be in uniform and drive postal vehicles (I've seen pictures of four wheel drive postal vehicles for rural areas). I looked it up and sure enough, this is common practice in rural areas. Where I am right now it's rural enough to often see tractors on the road and there are farms just up the road, but I guess it's not rural enough for that.

[Grogan]

I wondered that too... in the U.S. they are big on privatization and contracting things out. Here it's mostly Canada Post trucks and uniformed employees, but there are situations where, say, in a small town a local general store or something like it will run the post office. Also possible that rural mail delivery is done by owned vehicles with a Canada Post thing stuck on top of the roof. It won't be some yahoo in a cowboy hat and pickup truck though

[Zema Bus]

I have a virtual mailbox setup, I just have to get a USPS form notarized so that they can legally accept my mail. The notary site said they have notaries available 24/7 and it only takes 15 mins, I thought cool, I'll do it after work. So I went through all the hoops of verifying my ID, taking pics of my 2 forms of ID. That wasn't fun, my webcam couldn't take non-blurry pics of the text on my driver license so I had to use my phone (via a QR code) which worked, but it made me scroll down to tap the button to take the pic and in doing so I couldn't tell if it was still lined up for the picture. I had to do a few retakes of that. After that it let me go back to the computer I was using. Then I had a bunch of questions to answer, like my previous address, vehicles I've owned etc. I was afraid they'd ask questions about relatives I haven't seen in years, that happened once for another ID verification - I was asked a question about what properties a relative owned and I didn't have a clue. But this one fortunately didn't do that. So I got though all of that successfully and finally it was time to connect with an online notary so that I could get this chore over with. Except, it tells me there were none, and to try again later. Nice of them not to tell me that up front. So much for 24/7 availability. So I'll have to try again in the morning, I hope this game saved my progress

[Grogan]

Fuck, I hate doing shit like that. At least you have the images.

It's always a pain in the ass too, shit like that tends to intermittently fail.

[Zema Bus]

It's done! They retained some of my text entries from last night but they made me answer the questions again (they were different questions from last night) and retake the pics of my driver lic and vehicle registration card, front and back, so I had to struggle with that again. I was connected with a notary in TX, that part only took a couple mins.

[Grogan]

I'm glad it's done, but they made that arbitrarily difficult. Typical bureaucratic nonsense.