When you open a bank account or a credit card, you need to show a government-issued ID.
If you want to change your address with the post office, you can go in person, where you’re supposed to show identification, or you can do it online for a $1.10 fee with a credit or debit card.
That doesn’t give consumers enough protection from the growing threat of change of address fraud, U.S. Representative Josh Gottheimer said Monday at a press conference outside the Paramus post office.
Gottheimer, D-5th Dist., said the current system to verify address changes is “far too lax. It’s a complete scam. It’s a real magnet and a hotbed of activity. It’s widespread and it’s growing like a fungus.”
“We could take simple steps to fix it,” Gottheimer said, standing with a victim of change of address fraud. “This vital service must be corrected.”
Change of address fraud happens when a con artist convinces the postal service to deliver your mail to a different address. When they receive your bank statements, credit card bills and other personal information, they can open accounts in your name and otherwise steal your identity.
The postal service’s Office of the Inspector General in April 2022 cited 23,606 cases in 2021, up 167% from the year before.
Gottheimer said when his staff recently changed office locations in New Jersey, they weren’t asked to show identification in person when they made the address change.
“I don’t know how the U.S. Postal Service can possibly believe that they have sufficient protections in place with these sky-high cases of mail fraud,’ Gottheimer told NJ Advance Media before the press conference. “Unfortunately, because of egregious inaction from the USPS, far too many Jersey residents are in the bullseye of fraudsters and hucksters.”
It happened to an NJ Advance Media reporter last summer when someone changed her family’s address with the postal service. The scammer quickly opened a new bank account in their name.
At the press conference, Paramus resident Alyse, who asked that her last name be withheld to protect her privacy, said in 2018, she noticed she was getting less mail, but when she visited the post office multiple times to ask about it, she said she was told she had a new mail carrier and to be patient.
But about two weeks later, she started to get calls about unpaid bills — bills she should have received in the mail.
That’s when she realized all of her addresses, including for a car lease and a credit card, had been changed to an address in Philadelphia, something she said was finally confirmed by a postal supervisor who told her there were 11 change of address requests that day, all to the same address.
She said she never received a postcard from the postal service saying the address had been changed, a protection that’s supposed to be in place.
Then the post office told her it would take two weeks to reverse the change of address, leaving more time for the con artists to receive her private mail.
“That was a full-time job for almost two months (to correct the fraudulently changed addresses) and we thought we were doing okay,” she said. “A year and a half later, my ID was stolen again. They got into my bank accounts and created a license in my name with their picture. They started opening up credit cards.”
She said she believes it all stems back to the postal fraud.
ASKING FOR MORE PROTECTIONS
In a bipartisan letter to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, Gottheimer is calling for more protections. The letter asks for an update on what the postal service is doing to strengthen the authentication processes and add systems to protect consumers to prevent change of address fraud.
He is also pushing for the Postal Inspection Service, the postal service’s law enforcement arm, to do more to get to the bottom of unsolved cases of change of address and mail fraud.
Gottheimer said government-issued IDs should be required when someone changes an address online and that two-factor authentication should be part of the process. Plus, he said, consumers should be able to freeze their postal accounts to stop address changes in the same way consumers can freeze their credit reports to stop anyone from opening new credit lines. Today, someone must already be a victim to put a freeze on address changes with the postal service.
“The circus at the US Postal Service has gone on long enough,” Gottheimer said. “Our families deserve answers, and they deserve to know that the Postal Service is doing everything they can to ensure their mail, credit cards, checks, bank info, tax returns, Social Security numbers, and life-saving medications are safe from thieves.”
The April 2022 report from the Inspector General said the current change of address website had “ineffective identity verification controls” that allow bad actors to facilitate mail and identity theft. In response, the postal service said its protections were “sufficient.”
When someone changes their address online, they fill out a form and pay a $1.10 “identity validation fee” with a credit or debit card.
“When you enter your credit card or debit card number and billing address, we can electronically verify your card’s information with the issuing bank,” the postal service website said.
It’s unclear how or if the system can verify that the credit or debit card being used actually belongs to the person at the address in question.
The Postal Service previously didn’t respond to specific questions from NJ Advance Media about how the online address change request uses a person’s credit or debit card to verify their identity, but it said it makes “every effort to safeguard against criminal activity as it relates to the mail.”
To keep tabs on their mail, consumers can sign up for the U.S. Postal Service’s free Informed Delivery service, which sends a daily email with images of the mail they can expect to be delivered that day.
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Karin Price Mueller may be reached at KPriceMueller@NJAdvanceMedia.com. Follow her on Twitter at @KPMueller.
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