Thieves are making bold moves to steal mail -- they’re using keys.
Surveillance video at an apartment building near the UC Berkeley campus showed a man casually walking up to a security box, opening the door with a key and letting a second person slip in. A move building manager Bob Dister just stumbled upon.
“I just check the video footage every couple of days and I saw that somebody used a key to enter the building and steal the mail,” he said. “If we didn’t have the video footage I probably wouldn’t know that it happened.”
It happened at the 2300 block of Le Conte Avenue in Berkeley around 3 a.m.
“One of our tenants was in the lobby walking a minute before they came in. They were that close to running into each other,” said Dister.
He is convinced the mail thieves had a master key mail carriers use to get into the building.
“They just came in, started opening up these boxes, each bank opens up, they started opening up rifling through and taking the mail out,” said Dister. “One grabbed a package that was here and they were on their way.”
Local
U.S. Postal Investigator Jeff Fitch said mail theft is not only a Bay Area problem, but a problem nationwide.
“These are federal crimes,” he said. “Theft of mail potentially five years in prison and up to $250,000 fine.”
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In this case it may stem from mail carriers getting robbed of their master keys.
“We’ve had robberies of letter carriers here in the Bay Area,” Fitch said. "A number in Oakland, a number in San Francisco but we also had one robbery in Berkeley.”
U.S. Postal Service said they take this very seriously and they have a standing reward for information leading up to the arrest and conviction of the person doing this.
That reward is up to $10,000.
