Chicago police are investigating a recent mail theft in the city’s Greektown neighborhood, NBC 5’s Regina Waldroup reports.
After arriving at a Greektown condo building in a U-Haul truck, masked thieves were in and out in less than two minutes, ransacking the mail room in the theft.
“They didn’t steal all the Amazon boxes or packages,” resident Jeremy Cabral said.
“They came in and stole the mail. My first assumption is W-2 forms, that are prime for identity theft. It has your name, social security number and salary,” Cabral added.
The robbery happened at around 1 a.m. Tuesday at a building in the 1100 block of West Jackson.
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Cabral believes the thieves used an arrow postal key stolen from a letter carrier to gain access to the building and mailboxes. Chicago police said Area 3 detectives are investigating.
The Postal Inspection Service told NBC-5 that they have made contact with the building.
“Carriers are getting robbed and those arrow keys are being stolen,” said Frank Albergo who is the National President of the Postal Police Officer’s Association.
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“Those keys give access to mail to buildings in a given zip code. The inspection service is doing very little about it- it needs to be stopped," Albergo said.
Albergo added that he thinks postal police need to be back on the street, while calling for stiffer penalties for mail theft. He said that arrow keys should be replaced with some other technology.
“We are still using arrow keys from the 1950s. It is ridiculous. They are easily counterfeited, easily stolen. Once stolen, you cannot deactivate them,” Albergo said.
