HOLLYWOOD — It started with a few missing checks and became, over the late summer, a problem the whole neighborhood was talking about: mail disappearing from boxes across the blocks below the Hollywood Hills, checks altered and cashed, packages gone from doorsteps within minutes of delivery.
Residents in the Beachwood Canyon and Franklin Avenue area say the thefts have climbed sharply since July. Several described the same pattern — a bill paid by check that never reached the utility, followed weeks later by a bank notice that the check had been cashed for a different amount, made out to a name no one recognized. At least one blue Postal Service collection box on Franklin, neighbors said, was hit more than once before it was emptied and its slot narrowed.
“I put a birthday card in the box on the corner with a check in it, and my sister never got it, and three weeks later my account was short four hundred dollars,” said Delphine Rooker, who has lived on her block for eleven years. “Now I drive to the post office and hand it to a person. I don’t trust the box on my own street, and I’ve mailed letters from that box for a decade.”
The Postal Inspection Service, which investigates mail theft, does not comment on specific open cases, but the crime it describes has grown across Los Angeles in recent years. Thieves fish envelopes out of collection boxes with sticky traps on a string, or steal a carrier’s master key, then “wash” stolen checks — chemically erasing the ink and rewriting the amount and payee. A check dropped in a box on a Friday evening, sitting until Monday’s pickup, is a particular target.
Neighbors have responded with the tools available to them, which are mostly small. Online neighborhood groups fill with photographs of porch thieves and warnings about which boxes to avoid. Some residents have switched to paying bills online or mailing only from inside the post office. Others have organized informal watches, though there is little to watch; the thefts happen fast and quietly, often in the middle of the night.
A letter carrier who works the area, and who asked not to be named because she was not authorized to speak, said carriers were as frustrated as residents. Keys had been tightened and some boxes relocated, she said, but the collection boxes were an old design and a soft target, and the fixes kept lagging behind the thieves.
The Postal Service urges customers to deposit mail inside a post office or hand it directly to a carrier, and to collect delivered mail promptly rather than leaving it overnight. It is sensible advice, and a quiet admission of the same thing the neighborhood has already concluded: for now, the blue box on the corner, a fixture of the street for as long as anyone can remember, is not to be trusted.