Sep. 9—U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen pressed the U.S. Postal Service Thursday about what it is doing to prevent mail schemes like those that victimized a Peterborough woman and a Goffstown resident.
Scammers ran a con that involved getting the Postal Service to forward the mail of the two people to new addresses, as The Sentinel reported in July.
The Office of Inspector General said in a report this year that thousands of cases of mail fraud make clear that improvements are needed, but added that the Postal Service has declined to tighten its change-of-address procedures.
Shaheen, a Democrat from Madbury, sent a letter Thursday to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, saying the two New Hampshire cases reported to her office raise concerns about the security of these procedures and the agency’s ability to confirm the identity of those making mail-forwarding requests.
The inspector general’s office issued a “management alert report” on April 12 that said more needs to be done to authenticate these requests.
Such requests that were confirmed as fraudulent jumped from 8,857 in 2020 to 23,606 last year — a 167 percent increase, the report said.
The report said the Postal Service’s response to the inspector general’s recommendations for improvements was that it had “thoroughly assessed the risk, cost, and failure rate of options and continue to assess these [current] controls as sufficient.”
Shaheen said in her letter the situation needs to be resolved.
“Protecting our citizens’ identities…
