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You can always trust the scammers to come up with new and creative ways to separate us from our money. You’re likely familiar with phone fraud and email phishing, but do you know about “mail fishing?”
Mail fishing is when criminals lower contraptions in your mailbox to “fish” out your check, gift card or package, just like they would in a body of water. In many cases, the crooks will even use fishing line or a string that has been caked with adhesive.
There have been “several complaints” of checks fished from mailboxes in New York City’s Queens borough, according to QNS.com.
An elderly woman in Manhattan put a check made out for $112 in a blue mailbox on the Upper West Side, according to USA Today. It never made it to its destination. To make matters worse, the perpetrator modified the check so that it was made out for $3,500.
“I pay all my bills by mail — around 30 checks a month,” Josefina Gomez Pando, 83, told USA Today. “This never happened to me.” Her bank was able to stop the check, but many more are falling victim to this fast-growing crime.
Mail fishing has “doubled over the last two years, at least,” Lt. John Grimpel, a spokesman for the New York City Police Department, was quoted by USA Today as saying.
To head off criminals that would use our mailboxes as ponds stocked with our hard-earned money, we need to take a few precautionary measures:
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This post was last modified on July 10, 2018 10:23 am
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