Campbell County Sheriff’s Office Shares Tips To Combat Mail Fraud/Theft

RUSTBURG, VA - On behalf of Sheriff Whit Clark, our staff would like to personally thank everyone for signing up for the new program, called CARE Alerts. Our Community and Responder Engagement, or CARE, Alerts  are designed to educate our Campbell County citizens about what type of crime we are seeing in the county and hopefully provide helpful tips that will prevent you from becoming a victim.

We now have thousands of Campbell County citizens and hundreds of businesses, receiving these alerts. We encourage you to tell your friends and family about these alerts and ask them to sign up for them if they would like to receive them. The whole idea behind these alerts is to work more with you, our citizens and business owners, directly to prevent you from becoming a victim of a crime. We encourage you to start a conversation with your friends, family members, and co-workers based on the information that we provide you. A good example of this is phone scams. In the coming weeks, we will go into detail about phone scams and how they work. By spreading the word about the information that we are providing, we hope that you can prevent others from becoming victims as well. 

Our first CARE Alert covers a type of crime that we see, periodically. Recently, a member of our Crime Suppression Team conducted a traffic stop on a vehicle that led to an investigation into mail theft that had been going on in the Altavista area. We see packages that get stolen from people’s porches from time to time but, rarely do we see individuals stealing mail from people’s mailboxes. When this happens, these criminals target a large number of mailboxes, and it takes time to conduct a thorough investigation. This traffic stop resulted in identifying suspects in the cases and the investigation will likely result in future charges for the individuals involved, as soon as the investigation is complete.

At times, we do see criminals targeting business mailboxes. What these criminals are looking for are their outgoing business checks. These criminals commonly travel around multiple states looking for these checks and they end up recreating them with someone else’s name on them. When they get cashed in another state, the business owner will not know the person who cashes them and likely they don’t find out that this has happened until after the check has been cashed. A tip on how to prevent this is listed below. 

If you didn’t already know, the USPS offers a service called, Informed Delivery. This system allows you to sign up to receive daily pictures of your mail before it is delivered to your residence. This system is free and citizens can register by visiting: USPS Informed Delivery. Imagine if you had pictures of the items that are being delivered and they are stolen. You will know instantly if someone has stolen your mail and we will have pictures of the envelopes/packages so that we know exactly what to look for when conducting the investigation.

We would also like to encourage our citizens, if possible, to include their mailboxes in the view of their home surveillance systems, if they have them. This way, we can possibly obtain footage of the vehicle involved in the theft, and the date and time of the theft will be known.

Business owners - The best way to avoid becoming a victim of these types of larcenies, is to use a post office box for all your mail or simply deliver your checks directly to the post office to be mailed out.  Remember these criminals are specifically targeting business mailboxes for your checks.

A point that we can’t stress enough is that Campbell County is an extremely safe county and by providing these alerts we simply want our citizens to learn from the crimes that we do see. If possible, we are going to provide not just a description of what we are seeing but, tips like the ones listed above to help prevent crime. 

For more information about the CCSO CARE Alerts system or to register, visit www.campbellcountyva.gov or contact Captain Stuart Herndon; Campbell County Sheriff’s Office at (434) 332-9514.