Another postal theft . . .

Thank you for the reassurance. I was in the middle of deciding whether to buy something from there. Good to hear that the last couple of months hasn't upended more than it has.

 

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The "weight" game can be played a couple of ways. It's possible to mail something which will disappear in route on its own. Chunk of dry ice is an example. Will have a nice weight at counter and on printed receipt, but will disappear before arrival. Also possible for a thief to pilfer package contents and place equivalent, worthless weight in package (rock, smaller package, heavier packing, etc.), so it will still have a nice heft.

I haven't read enough evidence to speculate on fraud versus theft, or if it was theft, how it occurred.

Cal

 

The chances of people not realizing the box is freezing or the gassing coming out of it is almost 0

 

Pack it with reasonable insulation, and it won't be cold enough to notice. The out-gassing is too slow to be noticed. I've dealt with many shipments of biochemicals, and biological samples kept frozen with dry ice. Unless you read the label or opened the boxes, you wouldn't know it's there.

Cal

 

And why do they charge the lowest rate for packages sent Registered? Because it is the safest way to ship so their risk is very low.

 

Yup, that's correct. Cheapest by a stretch. Next lowest are various overnight services.

Cal

 

Which works fine because they're declared as such, you have to declare dry ice and mark the shipment as such

 

Um, I don't think someone who's doing it to commit insurance fraud will care much about postal regulations.

Cal

 

The postal employees will, the days of blindly mailing things where the post office has no idea what's inside are mostly over.

 

I mail packages all the time. The clerk goes through the litany of bad things and asks if any are in the package. I say no, which is true in my case, and pay the costs. Then it’s tossed in the bin. Perhaps a very small percentage of packages are x-rayed to check for bad things. It would be no trick at all to mail some dry ice without declaring it. I’ve bought liquid pesticides and few other nasties via eBay or other venues that I assumed would always be shipped via FedEx or UPS. Nope, some came via USPS. A friend once mailed some firecrackers with no problem!

Cal

 

More than a small amount, especially if something is cold to the touch. Every tried using informed delivery on the USPS site, most of the mail is tracked by camera pictures now and can even see what untracked letters you should be expecting that day.

Remember the old Anthrax letter scares where they were able to track what drop box an untracked letter was shipped from? There's a lot more in play than the average employee is aware of and if you make a 5 figure insurance claim that company is going to contact the postal inspectors and others which will trigger and investigation.

These fraud plans while they may have worked 30-40 years ago are not very piratical today and highly unlikely

 

finis argumentis ab me

 

Absolutely. Any item of any value at all should always be sent registered.

 

Switching to latin to say you're done doesn't change anything

 

I was told some of the bigger city USPS offices have x-ray scanning of certain packages, they can probably tell what kinds of items are in boxes. Especially if something is going out of the country I imagine they do some sort of inspecting of contents.

 

They do, and there's picturing of mail along the way and everything else.

 

A nut and a postal worker. What are the odds of that

 

I’d take the train

 

Yeah. Bought books and sent recite to my company. Got return envelope with big red printing. CHECK INSIDE. I had a fit. Reported it.

 

Thought you only knew baseball. You are spot on today. Well a few days ago. 8-3-20