(NewsNation) — The U.S. Postal Service is cracking down on mail theft this holiday season by installing 12,000 high-tech collection boxes in different parts of the country.
Thefts from the iconic blue mail collection boxes made up more than 25,000 of the mail theft incidents that occurred in the first half of the 2023 fiscal year, according to NBC.
“We are hardening targets — both physical and digital — to make them less desirable to thieves and working with our law enforcement partners to bring perpetrators to justice,” Gary Barksdale, the Postal Inspection Service’s chief postal inspector, said in a statement.
As of October, 10,000 of the high-security collection boxes have been installed in areas deemed “high-risk.”
The new boxes look the same as the old ones on the outside but are designed to “thwart a number of different attacks or ways that criminals try to break into them and steal our mail,” according to Michael Martel, a spokesperson for the Postal Inspection Service.
“There is no plan to stop until the mail is secure,” Martel said, adding that more boxes would be installed as needed.
Martel admitted there was no guarantee that the new collection boxes would completely solve the problem of theft, and advised customers to place mail in the boxes as close to the scheduled pickup time as possible to prevent possible thefts, NBC News reported.
