This story appeared a few days ago:
Don’t put checks in the mail, the US Postal Service is warning. Scammers are stealing more of them than ever — draining bank accounts and causing big headaches for banks and account holders. Banks issued roughly 680,000 reports of check fraud last year, up from 350,000 reports in 2021. And the US Postal Inspection Service reported roughly 300,000 complaints of mail theft in 2021, more than double the prior year’s total.
Like many businesses and families – especially those who have concerns about excessive use of electronic payments (due to security issues) – many of us here at TPOL frequently receive and send paper checks by mail. Checks have been a standard way (indeed, for almost a century the standard way) of sending payments to anywhere outside your hometown.
Our biggest problem with that has been checks lost (or delayed) in the USPS mail. Apparently, we have been fortunate. Or are we?
Periodically, we read of a USPS employee who has gone rogue and the authorities find hundreds of thousands of pieces of mail hidden away in some guy’s (or gal’s) residence – or a convenient gulley. And once in a while we learn of a semi-truck crash where a full 53-foot-long semitrailer filled with mail gets burned to ashes. Or we get a letter (once in while) torn in half – with a check. We’ve had checks lost in the mail, and sometimes delayed for months.
But for the USPS to warn us to NOT send checks? Does this strike anyone as strange? An over-reaction? According to the USPS itself, in 2019 (latest year data is available), they delivered 143 Billion pieces of mail to 160 million addresses. Even a million claims of check fraud amounts to just 1 in 143,000. An incredibly tiny amount.(0.0007%) That is about 1/10 the odds of getting hit by lightning. By contrast, we are told the chances of dying in an auto accident are just 1 in 103!
And the USPS is already seeing a serious dearth of “real mail” – first class mail like checks while junk mail seems to be a never-ending stream.
So why is the US Postal Service warning us about mailing checks? Could it be that this “independent” and “non-political” government-owned corporation has some motive other than preventing fraud to tell us to not mail checks? True, the USPS and the Post Office Department has been warning us for more than a century not to send cash in the mail. And some historians point out that is one reason that checking accounts and paper checks became so popular. Became the standard. Although there are many alternatives to the USPS today, the Postal Service is still a very influential part of American life.
As we see and hear more and more warnings about, and more and more government agencies seeming to push for “central bank digital currency” and more and more concerns about the ever-rising numbers of credit card and debit card fraud, we need to ask. Why now?
Are we here at TPOL and other places being paranoid to think that we are seeing yet another example of how the FedGov is pushing Americans into a cashless society? Not that checks are a form of cash, but they are intricately tied to the system that we have today. Are we wrong to wonder how this warning might be a small part of the government’s propaganda effort to push a cashless – and thus ever-more surveilled and controlled – economy on us?
Your thoughts?
About TPOL Nathan
Follower of Christ Jesus (a christian), Pahasapan (resident of the Black Hills), Westerner, Lover of Liberty, Free-Market Anarchist, Engineer, Army Officer, Husband, Father, Historian, Writer, Evangelist. Successor to Lady Susan (Mama Liberty) at TPOL.
The Price of Liberty 
Fraud alert – nongovernmental?
This story appeared a few days ago:
Don’t send checks through the mail, the post office is warning …
Don’t put checks in the mail, the US Postal Service is warning. Scammers are stealing more of them than ever — draining bank accounts and causing big headaches for banks and account holders. Banks issued roughly 680,000 reports of check fraud last year, up from 350,000 reports in 2021. And the US Postal Inspection Service reported roughly 300,000 complaints of mail theft in 2021, more than double the prior year’s total.
Like many businesses and families – especially those who have concerns about excessive use of electronic payments (due to security issues) – many of us here at TPOL frequently receive and send paper checks by mail. Checks have been a standard way (indeed, for almost a century the standard way) of sending payments to anywhere outside your hometown.
Our biggest problem with that has been checks lost (or delayed) in the USPS mail. Apparently, we have been fortunate. Or are we?
Periodically, we read of a USPS employee who has gone rogue and the authorities find hundreds of thousands of pieces of mail hidden away in some guy’s (or gal’s) residence – or a convenient gulley. And once in a while we learn of a semi-truck crash where a full 53-foot-long semitrailer filled with mail gets burned to ashes. Or we get a letter (once in while) torn in half – with a check. We’ve had checks lost in the mail, and sometimes delayed for months.
But for the USPS to warn us to NOT send checks? Does this strike anyone as strange? An over-reaction? According to the USPS itself, in 2019 (latest year data is available), they delivered 143 Billion pieces of mail to 160 million addresses. Even a million claims of check fraud amounts to just 1 in 143,000. An incredibly tiny amount.(0.0007%) That is about 1/10 the odds of getting hit by lightning. By contrast, we are told the chances of dying in an auto accident are just 1 in 103!
And the USPS is already seeing a serious dearth of “real mail” – first class mail like checks while junk mail seems to be a never-ending stream.
So why is the US Postal Service warning us about mailing checks? Could it be that this “independent” and “non-political” government-owned corporation has some motive other than preventing fraud to tell us to not mail checks? True, the USPS and the Post Office Department has been warning us for more than a century not to send cash in the mail. And some historians point out that is one reason that checking accounts and paper checks became so popular. Became the standard. Although there are many alternatives to the USPS today, the Postal Service is still a very influential part of American life.
As we see and hear more and more warnings about, and more and more government agencies seeming to push for “central bank digital currency” and more and more concerns about the ever-rising numbers of credit card and debit card fraud, we need to ask. Why now?
Are we here at TPOL and other places being paranoid to think that we are seeing yet another example of how the FedGov is pushing Americans into a cashless society? Not that checks are a form of cash, but they are intricately tied to the system that we have today. Are we wrong to wonder how this warning might be a small part of the government’s propaganda effort to push a cashless – and thus ever-more surveilled and controlled – economy on us?
Your thoughts?
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About TPOL Nathan
Follower of Christ Jesus (a christian), Pahasapan (resident of the Black Hills), Westerner, Lover of Liberty, Free-Market Anarchist, Engineer, Army Officer, Husband, Father, Historian, Writer, Evangelist. Successor to Lady Susan (Mama Liberty) at TPOL.