A Southern California woman fed up with her packages getting stolen out of her post office box sent an Apple AirTag to the address and cleverly tracked down the suspected thief, police said.
The woman had had several items stolen from her mailbox at the Los Alamos Post Office already when she thought of the idea, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office said Tuesday. Apple’s $29 AirTags have become popular items since their 2021 release, helping users keep tabs on the location of anything from their lost keys to wallets and luggage.
On Monday morning, sheriff’s deputies were called to the post office where the woman told officials her mail had been stolen again — including the package with the AirTag.
Are post boxes at the post office not locked in the US? Do you not have to identify yourself or have a key? How can they keep stealing her mail not from her porch or something but from the actual postoffice?
They are locked, but as anyone who has watched 20 seconds or more of the Lockpicking Lawyer, the locks are trivially easy to defeat. Typically they are in an unsupervised area of the post office and most of the time there “isn’t budget” to even cover them with cameras, as if a premeditated thief would not just show up wearing a disguise anyway.
Never seen one without a key lock or combo lock. Could’ve been an inside job.
Serious. What’s the point of even having a post box?
The last town I lived in didn’t do door-to-door mail for ANYONE. If you want your mail, come to the post office.
Private carriers like Fedex/Purolator are a bit more accommodating, but tracking down your regular letter mail was your problem.
The post office worker’s would get super pissed off if you received mail with your actual address on it instead of the PO box too. Taking 10sec to type it into the computer to match street address with PO box was the end of the world apparently…
It depends on where you are. The commercial carriers often will use USPS as the “last mile” carrier to send stuff too. People dump on the US postal system (rightly so for a lot of things) but it really is an incredible system, when it works. And a lot of that is the government side to blame, making it more costly and inefficient where it could be better.
DeJoy is still in office actually, and is planning to further degrade service as soon as the election passes.
TIL there is a logistics/shipping company that shares a name with an oil filter manufacturer.
USPS doesn’t deliver to the house everywhere, so you’re stuck with a PO Box.
Drugs
There are other answers, but privacy as well. Some people who do business online may not want to give their home address out.
I live in a different country than the one I receive mail in
My parents have one because it’s more secure than an unlocked box on their street. My grandma had one because her town was small but spread out and it made more sense for the USPS to deliver to a central location rather than driving to each house.