Since the pandemic, mail theft has boomed. There was an 87% increase in reports of high-volume theft from mailboxes between 2019 and 2022, according to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. A report from the Government Accountability Office shows that the number of investigations into serious crimes investigated by the service nearly doubled between 2019 and 2023, from 609 cases to 1,198, an increase driven by a jump in robberies of mail carriers.
The Postal Service attributes the rise in theft to a few things: how easy it’s become to commit financial crimes using information stolen through the mail, the general uptick in fraud during the pandemic, and what it calls a “lax prosecutorial climate” for property crimes. It launched Project Safe Delivery in 2023 in an effort to shore up protections and launch technology and data to do more investigations.