Beware of Fraud at your Vacant Listings

For agents who have vacant listings, your mailbox may be a target for fraud if it is not key protected (like cluster mailboxes or some individual boxes that prevent snoopers from getting your mail without a key).  At vacant listings, be sure the post office has a stop order on all mail because the fraudsters are out in full force.

With the executive salary kicker Congress added to everyone's unemployment checks, an old criminal practice has become much more lucrative.  It seems people are collecting the addresses of vacant properties with unprotected mailboxes to have unemployment checks delivered to criminals who are not entitled to taxpayer money.  It's basically identity theft, but in some cases they are using a valid identity but stealing an address because the identity belongs to someone who has no address as required by the unemployment commission. 

Because they are utilizing the US Postal Service, one would think it becomes a FEDERAL CRIME, but we all know how efficient the government is at cracking down on waste/fraud/abuse and we also know it is unlikely the criminals will ever be prosecuted for stealing unemployment dollars from deserving employees who lost their legal jobs due to the virus.

Every time someone cheats their way into collecting an entitlement dollar they were not entitled to, it costs the rest of us.  Rather than waiting for the wheels of justice to slowly grind these criminals, I think it's a better approach to take away their means by making sure mail is not being delivered to empty unmonitored mailboxes.

If you are a property manager of a vacant property, you may already have the authority to tell the post office to halt mail.  If you have a vacant property as a sale listing, get the owner to halt mail from the post office.