US Post Office Stealing Mail

I suspect some are legitimately lost, and some are stolen, ending up in a garbage can two seconds after the thief realizes there's no money or checks in the envelope.

FYI, the ebay standard envelope is tracked by the USPS sorting machines. They read the code and that automatically adds an entry like "origin processing" and "destination processing". But there is never a manual scan made by a person. The algorithm marks them as delivered sometimes, but there is no actual delivery scan.

I use them all the time for cheap sales (<=$20). Been working fine. I probably sent 100 or so in total.

I want to report one bit of good news. I had a stamp lost in the mail around Thanksgiving and refunded the buyer in December. It arrived today and he is returning it to me. This was a couple hundred dollar item, 4 months somehow reappeared - he said it looks unopened. Hoping it is true.

I can tell you that stealing from the mail is a bad idea. The postal inspectors do not play games. If they find an employee of USPS is stealing anything from the mail. It is a federal offense and you will go to prison.

I can not see an USPS employee sorting mail even having the time to spot anything to steal. At the sporting center's the packages and enveloped are moving at lighting speed. In most cases I have heard of any thrifts would be at the office where is is sent from by a clerk or by the locals carrier. Those are the ones that handle the package or envelopes the most and can identify it's possible contents.

They have been in the past an occurence where a billion dealer lost packages. It was an USPS employee from the local office that took the items. They were aware how and when the dealer posted their packages. With knowledge of their business and price of gold and silver. The employee took the chance. The postal inspectors investigated and determined the culprit and arrested them.

Lost envelopes and packages are sent to the dead letter morge. Where every effort is made to determine where it is going or where it was sent from. In an effort to return it to in rightful owner. In some cases it can not be done. In this case it is placed in bonds and sold at auction to the highest bidder as dead mail.

Hi Uknjay,
Your comment about the Dead Letter Office got me thinking. I posted a question for you in the thread on Counterfeit Forever stamps,

https://goscf.com/t/80407&whichpage=5#779048

Some people may think the "US Post Office is Stealing Mail" if the USPS goes through with their plan to confiscate letters and packages that use counterfeit stamps as postage.

I do not believe that the USPS has a plan 'to confiscate letters and packages that use counterfeit stamps'. They have a plan to deal with the mail sent by a number of 'mass mailers' (junk mail) who are using counterfeit stamps. These mass mailers send out millions of pieces of mail that carry counterfeit postage and no legitimate return address. Since it is doubtful that postal patrons would like to get postage due on their junk mail and because it is fairly easy to ID these mass mailings in the mail stream, the USPS is seeking a remove them and destroy them.

I do not think that the USPS is targeting the much smaller amount of occasional usage of counterfeit First-Class mail. As has been well documented in this forum, the highly automated mail handling process often does not even cancel mail pieces. The 'return on investment' in trying to ID and remove a First-Class mail piece from you to me is nowhere near feasible. But if they can pull, analyze, and ID a counterfeit stamp from one of the bundles of tens of thousands mass mailings, plucking them out of the mail stream is feasible.
Don

60 million in six months. WOW!

I hate the USPS so much.

Another $1,500 in stamps and postcards missing somewhere in the system. Tracking showed Inbound into Customs in NYC, then a week later updated to show is was outbound to the US from the Frankfurt logistics center... again. So apparently, after it cleared Customs, it was loaded on a plane back to Germany instead of to me. Now USPS says Germany has it, and Germany says USPS has it.

I hope the sending pops up again.

You do not state when it should have arrived back in Germany.
My experience with the Dutch postal service is that sendings from abroad, even when they have a track and trace number, drop under the radar for a day or even a few days when in the customs depot. I would not be surprised if such happens in Germany as well.