On May 10, Monte Sereno resident Kim Simon was making last-minute arrangements ahead of a quick trip to Los Cabos, Mexico with her husband.
She figured they better catch up with their general contractor, who was midway through the construction of their pool house.
She dashed off a $13,634.81 check from her Wells Fargo account, then popped it into their mailbox by the street.
A couple weeks later, their contractor reached out to ask if they were planning on paying him any time soon.
“I just ended up writing a new check and handed it to him,” she said. “And that was that.”
She figured he could just rip up the original when it turned up. She realizes now that was a big mistake.
Suddenly, on June 8 at 3:06pm, she got a notification from her Wells Fargo app that her balance had dropped precipitously low. That doesn’t make any sense at all, she thought. “And that’s when I knew something was wrong.”
Simon called Wells Fargo and spoke with someone who told her it appeared the original check had been stolen and “washed.” That’s when a real check is altered—sometimes with chemicals, sometimes digitally—and diverted to a different account than that of the intended recipient.
‘I have proof that my check was in the possession of the postal service’
—Kim Simon, Monte Sereno resident
The transfer of funds was “pending” at the time. “They tried to stop payment on it,” she said. About a week-and-a-half later, she got a letter with the good news. “The money was never transferred out of my account,” she said.
Then, she shifted her attention to the mystery at hand: What the heck happened?
“I have proof that my check was in (the) possession of the postal service,” she said, referring to footage—from a neighbor’s security camera—of a postal worker on their street doing their rounds shortly after she’d put the check in. “I care deeply because the theft occurred in the postal service itself. And I think that’s incredibly alarming and should be disturbing for anyone that hears this.”
Simon clarified she was not pointing any fingers at anyone within the federal agency. She just wanted to learn the truth about what happened.
She handed the video over to the Los Gatos-Monte Sereno Police Department (she says they were “super responsive”)—specifically Officer Nathan Delia.
“The officer with LGMSPD just confirmed to me today that he has forwarded his report to the USPS as he has determined that the theft occurred within the USPS system,” she told the newspaper on June 15.
Simon was feeling disheartened about the whole thing; she was not confident she’d get a satisfactory outcome.
“I filed a report with the USPS Office of Inspector General and included the police report,” she said in an Aug. 7 email. “I was, soon after, called from the USPS OIG local inspector…she explained that, due to the recent dramatic increase in reports of mail theft, she investigated the LG post office. What she found out was there was an area at the post office that was not secured nor under video surveillance. Additionally, they had identified a group of individuals who have stolen ‘batches of mail’ from this area.”
Simon didn’t ask how exactly they figured out who they were looking for.
“They have since addressed this lapse in security and she feels they are nearly 100% confident they’ve resolved the issue,” the Monte Sereno homeowner added. “She assured me that this was not an internal employee, that this has been a set of crimes by people outside the system. Yet, I can’t imagine that this unsecured area at the post office was somehow randomly found without the help of someone who works there.”
And so, despite the progress made in the fraud investigation, Simon remains suspicious.
On Aug. 21, the Los Gatan spoke with Matthew Norfleet, a USPS inspector based in the Bay Area.
He declined to discuss the specifics of Simon’s case.
He said a $13,000 payment would fall into the “medium-sized” amount of money to go missing, and noted, sometimes the figures are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And while Norfleet says they take the possibility of internal theft seriously, he notes check-washing suggests an organized crime syndicate could be involved.
“Mail theft is not the kind of thing that somebody does one time,” he said. “In the Bay Area there’s absolutely a layered network.”
He urged others who’ve had money taken out of their bank account to report the crime.
“Banks have fraud protection, so they don’t end up missing anything,” he said, adding financial institutions often don’t bother reporting these thefts. “Please report that.”
Sunnyvale DPS recently arrested suspected mail thieves, finding mail from several different counties, Norfleet noted.
“We have been investigating back dock theft elsewhere on the peninsula as recently as last week,” he said.
