The U.S. Postal Service seeks to hire honest, hardworking people, but sometimes a few bad apples manage to find their way in. When you consider the vast workforce that is the Postal Service (over 635,000 employees as of 2022), it becomes apparent that cases where postal employees commit crimes are few. Even rarer are cases where they collude with each other to defraud USPS and its customers.
A recently closed investigation involved three postal employees who took advantage of customers on their delivery routes. The case came to our criminal investigators in December 2019, when the Lathrup Village Police Department and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service referred several complaints of mail theft, specifically credit cards, in Michigan’s 48076 delivery zone. USPS OIG special agents quickly identified a city carrier who then admitted to stealing credit cards for a non-employee co-conspirator.