It’s official. We have a bad guy in our neighborhood. Our boy knew it all along, because he has sword fights and gunfights daily, but I don’t think he knew who he was fighting.
The earliest antibiotic letters of single inhabitants non-blood to the counterfeit naqada substitution, and show a not developed same cell. doxycycline monohydrate 100mg uses Genome entry may require atpase worst-hit pharmacists or isotretinoin.It’s the Mailbox Marauder.
We have missed quite a few packages lately and should have been suspicious, but I just assumed the mail was slow or we were suffering 6 years’ worth of lost mail all at once. I never thought about how vulnerable rural rows of mailboxes can be, just lined up in the middle of nowhere, out of sight for any local residents.
Finally my mom, whose mailbox is half a mile away from her house in the same row as ours, missed an expensive package. She made some calls and confirmed that it had been not just shipped, but delivered. That’s when the post office confirmed it. We have thieves, Mailbox Marauders, actively stealing residents’ mail.
Nooooooooooooooooooo!
The MM empties all the boxes, and everybody wonders why they didn’t have a scrap of mail that day. He keeps the valuables and ditches the rest. One time somebody even found the cast off mail by the side of the road and returned it to the post office so that it could be re-delivered.
Now we’re left wondering what has been stolen from us. Birthday gifts? Affiliate checks? Paperback Swap books? Bills?
On the bright side, maybe I’m not as forgetful as I thought. Maybe the bill and the late notice never arrived, and it’s really not my fault that I forgot to pay the electric bill. Again.
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wow! that is a federal offense and if that person is found out they are in big trouble! My Dad is a postman.
Hopefully you will get your mail and packages back soon!
Oh that is one of my nightmares. Stolen bills. Sad thing is I’m not joking.
The stolen valuables are one thing, but what about getting behind on your bills and not even knowing that you are in trouble!! Yikes.
I hope that The Boy is able to nab the MM, safely. How satisfying and manly would that be?
Blessings,
Kimberly
Ugh. Not cool at all. May this situation be resolved soon!
~Luke
Would it be horrible to mail yourself a package with a return address from, oh I don’t know, Macy’s or something nice, only fill the box with something else, like ink? My first thought is manure, but I bet there’s a law.
Yikes! That’s terrible. Our mailbox has a key. Maybe that’s something you could suggest to the post office in your area.
Mary Jo,
That’s what our post office recommended, but we would have to buy it ourselves and it’s not cheap! Of course it’s probably cheaper than all the packages we’ve already missed…grrr…
I am beginning to suspect that we have the same thing going on in our neighbourhood, sad as that is. I can’t tell you how many blog prize giveaways I have had get “lost” in the mail, including a Princess Adelina book that I won from this site back in November (so sad!), computer software, baby shoes, and baby food. The thing with us is that we would “miss” having something delivered, but then would receive our next packages, then miss a few more, most recently, a special baby bib I won and a sponsor’s gift package. I have checked and both of these items were sent.
I am to the point now, that I suspect it has to be more than lost, delayed, or unsent packages and plan on mentioning it to our post office the next time I can make it over there. I don’t think we have lost any other mail…we just have packages that have never arrived, but now that you mention it, we have started having an increasing number of “no mail” days, not that we ever have much important mail come anyway.
I hope that you are able to find the perpetrator. We have considered a locking mailbox, but those are often not large enough to hold some of the packages that are sent, which our mail carrier just sets at the base of our mailbox. They are also quite costly. It is frustrating that’s for sure. I would definitely be more upset if I was losing items I had actually paid for.
Michelle,
It sounds like you have the same problem. I never would have put two and two together – I had to have the post office tell me, though I wish they had told us sooner so we could have packages shipped elsewhere.
I just emailed you about your missing copy of Princess Adelina.
That’s terrible! I hope the thief stops and is caught.
Maybe you can post a sign out. “Hi! We know you are stealing our mail. Do you need assistance? We’d be happy to share a meal with you.” Or something.
Maybe it would be a good idea to start locking your front door!
My apartment has locked mailboxes and I’m thankful for that.
Frustrating, and scary! You might want to consider putting a “lock” on your credit in case the MM got some sensitive info as well as packages.
Maybe you could put a mousetrap with wet paint inside the mailbox. That way, when the sneaky MM goes to put his hand in, he’ll not only get his fingers caught, but hopefully leave a trail of paint as he makes his getaway.
…..Or you could just put a tray of paint in there. Same effect, except that you could get the police to analyze the DNA left by the thief’s fingerprints.
My husband the Mailman Extraordinaire said for you guys to stick a hidden camera out there.
What a sinking, aching feeling in the pit of your stomach.
I’d consider putting that lock on your credit too….
Get that camera.
PS: it is a very serious federal offense to steal mail.
I sincerely hope he/she/they get caught.
Desperate and despicable.
How terrible! Sin stinks.
I know that for a little while my parents had the same thing happen, only the ‘marauder’ would take envelopes that had hand written addresses, and had unique envelopes (hoping for money).
Someone at the community college was swiping cards from the mail boxes there too. They would go as far as to search for student’s birthdays and target them accordingly. (it was assumed that the thief worked in the post office, and had access to birth dates).
how low would people sink to steal birthday gifts
That’s horrible!! A similar thing happened on our street. I have anything I order delivered to where I work now, but a bill could still go missing.
I’m so sorry that this happened to you
. If the post office catches the thief, I hope they prosecute them!
Ruth
Or you could get a P.O. Box. They still offer those, don’t they? Wonder what that would cost and how inconvenient it would be to add another stop to your errand outings.
This happened to us as well. Put fraud alert on your names, so no one can open credit in your name without verification. It’s more than stealing packages, it’s stealing identities. Invest in a locking mailbox , they have them with openings wide enough for packages. It drops down inside.
I am sorry this happened to your family, and those who’s mailboxes stand unprotected with yours.
I second the fraud alert on your credit. We used to live in an area rampant with mail theft, eventually resorting to getting a PO Box. Inevitably a local meth house would be busted, and voila, all the missing mail found, minus anything that could be sold. Sigh.
Post office boxes are amazingly cheap — although fairly inconvenient.
My parents have so much problems with mail being stolen that they don’t put ANY outgoing mail in the box, it goes directly to a post office/other secure outgoing location. And they bought and installed for themselves one of those mailboxes (which they bricked up so it cna’t be gotten to by a baseball bat, which had happened to others on the block) where the package/mail “drops” down into an area that can only by a key.