Now, he said, they see a weekly average of 2,000 checks for sale on the same 60 underground networks.Īnd, Maimon added, there are thousands of additional networks the cybersecurity group doesn't monitor. Maimon said when the cybersecurity group started monitoring these 60 networks two years ago, researchers found an average of 114 checks for sale each week. "On a typical platform you can find between 20-30,000 people being active on them," Maimon said. Maimon said the cybersecurity group monitors about 60 online networks where criminals buy and sell items that include post office mailbox keys and personal checks that he believes were stolen from mailboxes. The cybersecurity group is based at Georgia State University where Maimon is an associate professor in the department of criminal justice and criminology. "It looks like it's a very big problem at this point," Evidence Based Cybersecurity Research Group Director David Maimon said. The 'underground market' for stolen personal checksĬybersecurity experts say there's a fast-growing online underground market for stolen checks. You can report stolen mail by using this link to the United States Postal Inspection Service, the primary law enforcement agency for investigating mail fraud and mail theft. She said she closed her checking account and opened a new one. Altman said she alerted her bank, Stockyards Bank, which covered her loss. With the handwritten ink erased, criminals write in higher dollar amounts on the same checks and make them out to themselves or others involved in their crimes. "Immediately, we knew something was wrong."įor decades, thieves have used easily accessible chemicals to 'wash' ink off checks without damaging the checks. "We saw on our account that it had been written to someone we'd never heard of and the amount changed from say $100 to $11,000," she said. Altman said she put the $100 check in an outdoor blue mailbox in Hyde Park and assumed it would arrive safely. "We found out in January that a local check we had written never arrived," Hamilton County resident Ann Altman said. In addition to Norwood, postal workers have been robbed at gunpoint in Columbus, Cleveland and many other cities across the country, according to news reports. In some cases, a huge increase of reported mail thefts follows the robbery of a postal worker's mailbox key. Postal Service reported that complaints about mail theft increased 161% from March 2020 through February 2021. The WCPO 9 I-Team has spent weeks investigating local mail theft, how thieves are getting easy access to the mail, and what you can do to protect yourself from becoming a victim.Ī May 2021 report by the Office of Inspector General for the U.S. "Try to avoid all blue mailboxes inside Hamilton County," Burke warned. "At this time, our victims are at a loss of over $200,000."īurke and Sheriff Charmaine McGuffey urged people to go inside post offices to mail checks, gift cards and other potentially valuable items. Ryan Burke said in a video posted Tuesday on the Sheriff's Office's Facebook page. "We are currently investigating over 40 cases throughout the county of mail theft from these mailboxes," Det. Hamilton County Sheriff's Office detectives believe thieves are using Pierani's stolen post office key to unlock large blue mailboxes around the county and steal mail. 19 when a masked man wearing a hoodie pointed a gun at his head and demanded Pierani's master mailbox key. CINCINNATI - Norwood postal worker Ryan Pierani said he was eating lunch in his marked post office delivery vehicle Jan.
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