In this episode, we talk about the true crime story of how the Postal Inspection Service took down one of the largest fraud schemes in U.S. history, which fleeced more than 1.3 million victims for more than $175 million over two decades. Postal Inspector Clayton Gerber takes listeners behind the scenes, revealing the shocking tactics used by the scammers, from impersonating a psychic to exploiting data from mailing lists. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the dangers of fraud as we uncover the elaborate network of deception orchestrated by Patrice Runner.
This week on Mailin' It, we’re joined by Postal Inspector Clayton Gerber to discuss the Inspection Service’s role in breaking up one of the largest fraud schemes in U.S. history. From dumpster diving to find evidence to international extraditions during the height of the pandemic, the team's relentless pursuit to uncover the truth is nothing short of extraordinary. Grab your detective hat and join us for an eye-opening journey into the world of postal crime and learn how the Postal Inspection Service is working tirelessly to safeguard the public from fraudsters.
Karla Kirby:
Hello and welcome to Mailin’ It, the official podcast of the United States Postal Service. I'm Karla Kirby.
Jonathan Castillo:
And I'm Jonathan Castillo. This episode, we've got something really special lined up for you. We're speaking with a US Postal Inspector about a very interesting case. Today, we'll take you behind the scenes for an up close look at how the Postal Inspection Service investigates and solves crimes that often claim victims all around the world.
Karla Kirby:
We're joined by Postal Inspector Clayton Gerber to discuss the Inspection Services role in breaking up the largest fraud scheme in US history. It's a case that started small, but ended up scamming more than 175 million dollars from more than 1.3 million victims in the United States alone. I'll put that in perspective. We're talking about 35 times as many victims as Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, which was the biggest investment fraud in US history. Inspector Gerber, welcome to Mailin’ It.
Clayton Gerber:
Thanks very much for having me, looking forward to it.
Jonathan Castillo:
Based on what I've read and heard about this case, we've got a lot of ground to cover, and so I think it's best maybe if we just get right into it. Inspector Gerber, could you quickly take us through the basics before we drill down into all the specifics about the case?
Clayton Gerber:
Sure. So the case we're talking about today is one of the oldest types of fraud that we see in the Postal Service and with the Postal Inspection Service. It's an old school mail fraud case, mailed letters to millions and millions of Americans that claim you have won something or that you have received something, or you will receive something and they're hoping that you're gonna spend some money to get your winnings. Think lottery sweepstakes, the, like. What's different about this case? Maria Duval was believed to be a world renowned psychic who could see the future. She could see good things that were gonna come your way. She could see bad things that were gonna come your way, and if you paid her just a little bit of money, she would let you know what those good or bad things were. So in this scheme, this purported psychic Maria Duvall would mail out letters to you saying, I had a premonition about you last night, and good things are gonna come your way, and I can help you find this good fortune. All you need to do is send me $40 in an envelope. And I will tell you this good fortune, I'll tell you the winning lottery numbers. I'll tell you what rock to look under. I'll send you some secret talisman that will guard against any evil things. And those letters went out by the tens of millions to every corner of America, and people paid, they believed it.
Karla Kirby:
So to kind of understand this, on the surface, a person would receive a letter to their home that misled them to think they were being contacted by a psychic who said she could see into their lives and help them. So we have that and then this, so-called psychic would seal the deal over time by coming up with increasingly personalized predictions about the victim's future. So what was really happening behind the scenes?
Clayton Gerber:
Well, that's right. Once you paid the initial solicitation, the initial letter that got you on the hook, and then Maria would send you more letters. They would ask more personal information for your date of birth, where you were born, and the letters could be then personalized even more with some astrological reading about your birth, whatever your birth sign was, or something about your hometown or the state you were born in. But what really happened was there was a whole industry and a machine that would take the envelopes that you sent in with your money, slice them open, rip the cash out, record whatever personal information that you would send in, and then mail you another letter. It was a machine to mail letters and collect $40 and mail more letters, an endless cycle. And the more you paid, the more letters you would get.
Jonathan Castillo:
So there no psychics actually involved in this.
Clayton Gerber:
There were no psychics actually involved in this.
Jonathan Castillo:
Do you have like an example maybe anything that you can recall from that early time?
Clayton Gerber:
You know, the Postal Inspectors receive complaints from victims when they, they don't get a product, they order, that's the, the payment didn't get where it was going. And we, we had been getting some complaints about this. I'm not the, I've been paying this psychic, I'm not getting the, the winning lottery number and the like. We went out and visited a victim who had paid, a consumer who had paid, he thought he was a consumer. He lived outside of Philadelphia and knocked on his door, and he answers the door and he's standing at the doorr in sort of unclean clothes. He's got a rope tied around his waist. He's got torn up shoes. And we asked him if we could talk to him about a complaint he had filed. And he let us in. Going down the hallway to his house, the whole length of the hallway, he's got pictures of Maria Duvall that came in the letters. He's got pictures of the little talisman and the little trinkets that were mailed. We get farther in and he's got a shelf with all the little trinkets and medallions and things that would get mailed to you. This is all junk made in China that you would get sent for your $40 payment. And he genuinely believed that Maria Duval was a real person, and that she was sending him good fortune, and he would religiously pay her $40 every letter, every time. He didn't have enough money to buy a belt. He didn't have enough money to clean his clothes. He didn't have enough money to get a pair of shoes without holes in them, but he could pay $40. Further talking to him, he couldn't pay for his medicine. He was almost evicted from his home. He couldn't pay his utilities, but he believed Maria in these letters that kept coming to, wow.
Jonathan Castillo:
Let me ask you this. How did these scammers even come up with this, you know, original list of victims? You know, did they just mail people at random?
Clayton Gerber:
They don't mail people at random. Postal community knows stamps aren't cheap. They cost a good bit of money but America is very efficient at delivering. But they want, these fraudsters want to target as with as much laser focus as they can to someone who is susceptible, someone who is at home alone, an older American who is going to open their mail religiously and write that check. So the fraudsters would buy lists of consumers from data brokers. Data brokers are major corporations that deal in collecting information about you and me and optimizing that information and selling it to corporations so that they can market to you. And fraudsters are nothing more than a marketing company. And the fraudsters were buying that data from data brokers.
Karla Kirby:
So it sounds like this was a huge operation, but since the payments were so small, only $40, how did this get on your radar?
Clayton Gerber:
Well, that's exactly right. If a victim would've gone to a local police station and said, I lost $40 to Maria Duval, the police probably wouldn't even have taken a report. We took complaints. We took complaints for years. The complaints got to be sizable enough by around 2004 that the Postal Inspectors took notice and started to look into it, and we got copies of the solicitations. We immediately recognized it as a scam. You know, one letter to an individual is, is plausible. You know, an older American gets one of these and they think it could be from some long lost aunt or someone who cares about them, but when there's thousands, it's not believable. It's just mass produced letters. So we did an investigation back in 2004 and Postal Inspectors have a unique tool in our arsenal to withhold the mail. And we executed an administrative action. It's an order that we have through the Postal Service and our authority to withhold mail delivery. So we withheld mail delivery. So all of a sudden for this scheme, we stopped delivering all of these envelopes with money to the fraudster, and it makes them come to the table and talk to us. And that's what they did. We shut it off, we shut off the money, and they had to come and talk to us.
Jonathan Castillo:
Was there a specific address maybe that was like linked that you guys found out that was linked to it?
Clayton Gerber:
So typically these schemes we'll use a commercial mail receiving agency, a CMRA you know, the private mailbox shops, and they can open the box easily and then they can change that address quickly. And then they, the CMRA get paid to bundle that mail up and forward it off to another address. So it disguises where the person is actually operating.
Karla Kirby:
So can you tell us a little bit more about that administrative action you mentioned? So it's a tool that I'm assuming the Postal Service, as you mentioned, has. So under what authority can we stop mail delivery?
Clayton Gerber:
Sure. Well, the Postal Service has the authority to deliver mail to your address at your home. But we can also stop delivery of mail. And it is written in our regulations that you cannot use the US mail to commit a crime to further a criminal scheme. And we have the authority to withhold that mail. The Postal Service have administrative law judges that can issue these orders. Postal Inspectors themselves can issue these orders in an emergency situation to withhold mail. So think dangerous mailing, something that might be ticking, something that might be leaking. We can withhold that mail to ensure the safety and security of a person. We can withhold the mail if something is a crime, a fraud that is defrauding people. So we obtain the order to withhold the mail, and we stop delivering those payment envelopes. It causes the person to come to the table. They want their money, they want to, they wanna argue to us. They might wanna argue to us that what they're doing is legal and legitimate. In this case, they did come to the table and they tried to argue it was legal and legitimate. We negotiated back and forth and they agreed they would shut down. They agreed they would go out of business. The operator who was running the scheme was an individual French and Canadian descent - French and Canadian nationality named Patrice Runner. And that's who we named. They ultimately said, Patrice Runner's no longer involved in the business. We'll shut the business down and we will get outta the business.
Jonathan Castillo:
So if Patrice Runner agreed to shut down, you know, the, the Maria Duval scam, how was it able later on to resurface?
Clayton Gerber:
Well, that's right. It did resurface. So we negotiated that between 2004, 2006, and they claimed that Patrice Runner was outta the business, had nothing to do with it. And they changed the name that payments were going to, they changed the mailbox addresses the payments were going to, but in reality, they never shut down. They kept mailing to our victims. And so we, you know, our complaint system was essentially cleared out, and then we had to sort of wait and see for this to crop back up again, which is exactly what it did. They started mailing again, new addresses, new business names and it took us till about 2004 till the complaints got to a point where it was something we, we were paying attention to. And we started investigating again. And this time they, it was very clear they were the same solicitations. It was very clear they didn't stop as they had agreed to. So we are gonna go with a heavier level of enforcement.
Jonathan Castillo:
So at that point, how did the Inspection Service break the case open?
Clayton Gerber:
The simple aspect of breaking the case open at that point in time is to jump in a dumpster, right? It may not seem the greatest, but it's amazing what people throw away. Think about what you throw away at your trash can at the end of your driveway. Well, fraudsters throw a lot of stuff away. So we were able to investigate the scheme, figure out where the payment envelopes were going, where they were being forwarded to, who was slicing them open. And it was being done at a sort of a small three or four story office building on Long Island. And so we went in the middle of the night and we jumped in the dumpster and pulled all the trash out of the dumpster and dug through the trash. And lo and behold, there were 7,000 sliced open envelopes from victims, all the payment coupons, all the flotsam and jetsam and paper from running a scheme.
Karla Kirby:
So from the dumpster dive, you finally had what you needed as far as evidence to arrest Runner.
Clayton Gerber:
No, arrest is not the first thing that happened. What we wanted to do at that point in time is we wanted to shut this down once and for all. So we worked with the Department of Justice and we filed what's called a temporary restraining order, and we obtained a civil injunction. So it's a civil court order. It's not handcuffs, but it's a court order saying you are shut down. But it's more powerful than the Postal Service withholding mail. It is a court order that we serve on banks, and we serve on data brokers, and we serve on every service provider that helps them do this, the printing house, printing the envelopes printing the solicitations saying, this company is shut down. If you continue to work with them, you are in breach of this, and you could be sued or you could be arrested. And so that overnight shuts down a scheme like this.
Jonathan Castillo:
And so what was going on with Runner at this point?
Clayton Gerber:
So at this point, we didn't know that… We didn't know what was going on with Mr. Runner, Mr. Runner, as far as we knew from their representations before, he had nothing to do with it. We shut down the scheme. We have the court order, the businesses slices open the envelopes is now out of business. And we start collecting the evidence. We went in the door with a search warrant at that office, and we collected all the paperwork and envelopes, evidence, payments, computers, digital files, and we start sorting through that. And it was the review of all that evidence collected when we found out, wait a minute, this Patrice Runner guy is still running the show. He's still in charge. He's just using everybody else in front of him to hide his identity and hide his involvement.
Jonathan Castillo:
I'm assuming that once you cut that, you know, operation down, hhow was he able to even move around? Was able to pay for things.
Clayton Gerber:
Well, Mr. Runner had a very nice life for about 20 years. He lived very high on the hog running this scheme. From behind the scenes, he made millions and millions and tens of millions of dollars. He lived a jet set lifestyle. He started in Montreal, moved to Vancouver, Canada, then moved to Costa Rica, then Switzerland, then Germany, then Paris, then he moved to Ibiza, Spain, all on the backs of these fraudulent payments, these victim payments. And we shut the scheme down overnight, sort of shortly after he had moved to Ibiza. And this fraud scheme was his only means of income, and he was not saving for a rainy day. When we cut the money off, he was broke, and he ended up living in a tent on the beach in Ibiza with no money to even pay rent.
Jonathan Castillo:
And, when was that finally, when did you finally catch him?
Clayton Gerber:
So we shut the scheme down in 2014, end of 2014. And it took us a while to wrap up the case against the caging service. That's the company that slices open the envelopes, the data brokers and the like, and frankly, figure out where he's living. He had some individuals in Montreal that were running the day-to-Day. We approached them, they agreed to plead guilty and cooperate and give us evidence against Mr. Runner. And we were finally ready to charge him in 2018, and we charged him with a number of different mail fraud related and fraud related crimes, and then sought his extradition from Spain. He was living in Spain at the time, again, on a beach in Ibiza. It's nice if you can get it, I guess, although a tent's not a very good…
Jonathan Castillo:
Waterfront property!
Karla Kirby:
Right. How were you able to track him down?
Clayton Gerber:
Well, some of his employees were still in contact with him, and they were cooperating with us because we were gonna charge them with a crime. They agreed to plead guilty and cooperate. And so they let us know where he would last was. And then we reach out to law enforcement in Spain and they go, they go find him, they go look for him for us at our request, and they confirm, yes, he's here. No, he's not here. And the like.
Jonathan Castillo:
The Spanish authorities arrest runner in 2018. He finally gets extradited to the US in December of 2020. Right. That means that you had to go get 'em at the height of the pandemic. That couldn't have been easy.
Clayton Gerber:
It's not easy then that, that timing is, is unfortunately all true. What happens in an international arrest is the foreign country will arrest someone on your request. They'll take him before a judge, and he'll have hearings and due process. The judge will say, is this you? If the person denies it, they have to make a determination. Yes, that's the person that they we're actually seeking. The person will have some level of appeal in that foreign country. And he did. And then ultimately the process gets to the end where the, the judge in the foreign country orders him to be extradited. And that happened in November of, of 2020. We get word from the Spanish authorities Mr. Runner has been ordered to be extradited, and these are done by treaty with a foreign country. And the treaty with Spain says, we have to pick him up in 30 days, and if we don't pick 'em up in 30 days, they release him. It's our obligation to pick up our, our people. And we were in the height of the pandemic before a vaccine, and Spain had closed its border. They were not issuing visas to travel there. And we said, look, we're happy to get there. Had no idea how we were gonna do it, but you're not issuing visas. They said, we'll give you a special visas, we'll open our consulate in Washington DC and we'll give you a visa. And we're like, great. No American air carriers are flying to Spain right now because of the pandemic. And they said, that's not our problem. So we, we researched private jets, we researched, you name it, and ultimately the national airline of, of Spain - Iberia - agreed to allow us to transport a prisoner. They were still flying to the United States, but their planes were almost empty. So they were pretty happy to have a few Postal Inspectors and a prisoner as a paying fare. And so we flew over four days before Christmas in 2020, and we picked him up and put him on the plane in handcuffs and flew sitting next to him all the way back.
Karla Kirby:
Great. So this is an absolutely amazing story, and it shows the Postal Inspection Services global reach. So I'm curious, what made this such a convincing scam, of course, that it could last so long, have so many victims and make so much money?
Clayton Gerber:
Well, there's a lot there. This is convincing because first and foremost, you get this letter in the mail. People believe what they get in the mail. It has a, a tangible authenticity to it. It has a stamp. It, it must be true because I'm holding it in my hands, and the government came by and dropped it in my mailbox. It was believable because these were highly personalized letters. If I Clayton Gerber was receiving one of them, it would have my name throughout the letter. The letter could be six eight pages long, and my name would be in the letter merged in 6, 8, 10, 12, 15 times. It would refer to where I was born. It would refer to my date of birth. It seemed like they knew who I was. But the other reason it succeeds is it preyed on older Americans and their sense of isolation or their actual isolation. You know, I would like to say, since we just passed Mother's Day, that I talked to my mother on Mother's Day, and I might have missed it by a day. So if my mother, who's 84 gets a letter in the mail, she's getting attention and she's gonna pay attention to that. So, you know, these were, were perfect for their intended audience of older Americans.
Jonathan Castillo:
I'm sure it didn't hurt either - I think you mentioned a little bit earlier about the the amount, the $40 amount. It doesn't seem like that's even big enough to really trigger an investigation, right? So that must have played into it.
Clayton Gerber:
A lot of people will just say, oh, I'll pay $40. That's not, that's affordable. I can afford it. When I first showed one of these schemes to my wife, my wife's like, yeah, I'd probably give 'em $40. Let's see what it's like. The problem is you pay the first time and your resistance to paying the second time is lower. You've paid once, so you're gonna pay again, and then you're gonna pay again. And eventually you pay so many times that you tell yourself, well, if I admit that it's a scam and I've been tricked, then I have to admit I was wrong all those other times I paid. So you get into this vicious cycle where you just keep paying.
Karla Kirby:
So on average, how many letters would one victim receive?
Clayton Gerber:
So there was a sequence, a progression of letters that was about 150 different letters. If you went through the entire sequence and kept paying, they were mailing around 50,000 new letters out every week, 50 to 70,000 new letters each week to Americans. There was a sequence of about 150 letters - you paid on letter one, you'd get letter two, you paid on letter two, you'd get letter three. And if you kept paying 40 bucks a pop, you'd go get a whole 150 different letters in different variations. Now, most people would only pay 6, 8, 10 times, which think about that, that's 10 times is $400. That's a lot of money. But they were, they were remarkably effective. The initial letter didn't make them a lot of money. They'd mail out 20, 30, 40,000 new letters, and they may only get two or 3% to respond, but that two or 3% would get letter two, and they'd have 70, 80% respond. That was cost effective to them. This was a numbers game. This was fraud as a business.
Jonathan Castillo:
I guess at this point, it's more of kind of like an epilogue really, but whatever became of Runner.
Clayton Gerber:
So Mr. Runner came to the us. He thought he was going to get some sort of a bond, some sort of release before his trial. But that didn't happen because he didn't know anybody in the United States. He didn't have any family, any friends. So he was held, held in custody pretrial for about two years. He had a trial in Islip, New York, out on Long Island where his caging service was located in the summer of 2023. And he was convicted. He just had his sentencing about a month ago when he was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison.
Karla Kirby:
So where's the money?
Clayton Gerber:
Where's the money? Well, Mr. Runner spent everything that he got. So what we try to do is craft alternative resolutions that will make our victims whole. And in this case, the data brokers who make all the money, they make lots of money and they’re big corporations, we we were gonna charge them. They agreed to come to the table and cooperate. And in this case, the data broker business itself contributed hundreds of millions of dollars into a fund to make the victims whole. So as we sit here today, we have been able to give a hundred percent of the money back to every victim that we can still find. And we have very detailed records for 1.3 million Americans that paid to this scheme of various amounts over a decade. And anyone that we can find that's still alive has already gotten their money back. It is a rare, rare success.
Jonathan Castillo:
Inspector Gerber, once you were able to crack down on this huge scam, you were able to get all the money back to all the victims, like you said, a hundred percent. After all this time you know, chasing after these criminals and all the different types of fraud that you've been you know, combating, really, how does it make you feel to be able to get all that money back for these victims?
Clayton Gerber:
Well, this was extremely unusual. We, we never get to do this. We may get to return pennies on the dollar normally from a loss, but, but we were really excited to be able to craft this solution where we could get money back to victims. But we had a separate related trial - jury trial in Las Vegas, and we had to have some victims we had to have done, or so victims come to testify, and we were outside the courtroom, and one of the victims came up to us and said, you guys paid me my money back. And we're like, what? She's like, yeah, you guys sent me a check for, it was like $3,400 or something like that. She's like, I really needed that money. That was really helpful when that came. That was really fantastic. And, and it, it personalized what we were doing in ways that we had no idea. So it's a, it's a such a rare event, unfortunately, but fraudsters besides being really, really good at ripping people off, they're really good at spending money. So we, we super excited to be able to get the money back in this case.
Karla Kirby:
So, you know, given the magnitude of this case, what sort of impact has this had on how the Postal Inspection Service works, these types of, of claims or complaints?
Clayton Gerber:
Oh, really good question. After we shut this scheme down, and we had a sense of the scale, it was breathtaking. 7,000 new victims a week was unprecedented. We had never seen this before. And this caused us to revisit all the complaints that we had where it's $40 here, $20 there, $30 here, and where those schemes are located and really reevaluate how big they are, reevaluate the service providers that service those fraudsters. And to date, we have gone after every one of them, we have gone after all the service providers, we have gone after the printing houses. We have, we have charged criminally the major mailer who prints and stuffs envelopes, but they were dedicated to printing and stuffing envelopes for fraudsters, the data brokers, the teaching services that slice open the envelopes, the money launderers who move the money for these fraudsters. And we have gone after every part of that industry, we’re reevaluating the way to take this down. 10 years ago, sweepstakes lottery psychic schemes were the number one complaint reported to consumer protection agencies. I was at a conference last week and that it is now number nine. We moved this crime from number one to number nine through the efforts of, of concentrated enforcement and going after this - we're talking $40 losses that were number one complaint by Americans is almost gone.
Jonathan Castillo:
You mentioned, you know, all the lessons learned, so to speak that the Postal Inspection Service was able to pick up on after just that the size and magnitude of, of a case like this. I think that there are a lot of lessons for postal customers as well, right? So for starters, they should be wary of notifications in the mail or otherwise about randomly winning prizes or sweepstakes. Fraudsters make their living really by trying to make their scams seem as realistic as possible. So it's important to not be fooled by them. Right. And then, as you mentioned, just right now, listeners can find tips from USPIS and the Postal Service on how to protect yourself against scams like these@uspis.gov.
Karla Kirby:
Any other parting lessons or tips for our listeners?
Clayton Gerber:
Well I don't have anything specific. I would say the overwhelming majority of mail you get in your mailbox is genuine, and you can rely on that. But in schemes like this, you're not winning if you're not playing. Meaning, if you didn't enter a contest, you didn't win that contest. If you don't know Maria, she doesn't know you. So I mean, people can easily get distracted by a shiny object in front of them. And it's tough to harden the target. It's tough to educate. It's tough to ensure that you make the right decision every time.
Jonathan Castillo:
Inspector Gerber, thank you so much for joining us today. It was truly enlightening to hear your story on this.
Clayton Gerber:
It's been my pleasure. It's been fun to be here.
Karla Kirby:
Definitely thank you for being here, and hopefully you'll be able to come back in the future and share some other stories with us.
Clayton Gerber:
I'd love to.
Karla Kirby:
And now it's time for another, Did you Know, segment where Jonathan and I swap surprising facts about the Postal Service. I'll start things off today. Jonathan. Did you know that some post office trucks used to be protected by armed guards?
Jonathan Castillo:
Armed guards for postal trucks?
Karla Kirby:
Believe it or not, yes. In October, 1921, a group of thieves stole nearly $2 million worth of money, jewelry, and securities from a mail truck in New York City. Postal officials spring into action deploying armed guards to follow mail trucks around the big apple on motorcycles. The Postal Service had wanted to assign armed guards to follow around mail trucks earlier in the year, but unfortunately, there weren't enough guards to go around at the time.
Jonathan Castillo:
Well, that's not helpful. So what happened next?
Karla Kirby:
By November, Marines were being assigned to guard railroad terminals, post office stations and mail trucks. A total of 6.6 million was stolen in a series of mail truck robberies throughout 1921. In response, Postmaster General Will H Hayes declared an open war with crooks, bandits and robbers, and requested 1000 Marines to guard the mail and post offices in 13 of America's largest cities. The post office also outfitted mail trucks with bulletproof windows and tires and equipped mail clerks and drivers with guns.
Jonathan Castillo:
Wow, they were not messing around.
Karla Kirby:
You're telling me. Thankfully, we no longer need a military unit to protect our mail carriers, but armed guards are still called occasionally to escort especially valuable shipments.
Jonathan Castillo:
I'm glad the Postal Service has always prioritized the safety of their workers, even if it meant calling in a favor with the Marines. For my, did, you know, we're headed from the city streets to the open road. Karla, did you know there used to be traveling post office buses?
Karla Kirby:
Now this, I need to hear.
Jonathan Castillo:
They were called Highway post offices or HPO’s, and they first drove onto the scene in 1941 with a route between Washington, DC and Harrisonburg, Virginia aboard the vibrant red, white, and blue buses, mail clerks tirelessly, sorted mail as it traveled from town to town.
Karla Kirby:
This sounds familiar.
Jonathan Castillo:
That's because HPO’s were pretty similar in function to railway post offices. And their interiors were basically identical too, from the barred windows to the mail sack holders. As highways became the new railways, HPO’s took off at their peak in 1959, there were 172 HOP’s operating across the country.
Karla Kirby:
Sounds very cool, but why do I have a feeling the heyday of HPO’s has long since passed?
Jonathan Castillo:
Well, there was a major shakeup in the sixties and seventies as the USPS adopted a regional center concept with high speed sorting machines, basically rendering HPO’s obsolete. The last HPO drove into the sunset in Cleveland, Ohio in 1974.
Karla Kirby:
And that wraps up this episode of Did you Know?
Jonathan Castillo:
Karla, what really caught my attention after hearing Inspector Gerber's story is just how prevalent these mail fraud schemes still are today’s age. You know, you wouldn't think that something like this is even possible nowadays, but it just goes to show you that we have to remain vigilant and stay informed to protect both ourselves and our loved ones from falling victim to something like this.
Karla Kirby:
You know, I completely agree. I think one telling thing for me as I was listening to Inspector Gerber was just how many different entities were involved, like the data houses with the list, they're selling it to the scammer. And so I think yes, definitely for our folks that are listening, be vigilant, do not, you know, provide your information unless it's absolutely necessary. That will help cut down on the fraud. But clearly listening, they're making a dent, but it just seems like they can come up with a new scam tomorrow.
So that's all for this episode of Mailin’ It. Don't forget to subscribe to Mailin’ It wherever you get your podcast. To make sure you don't miss the next episode. And follow along on Instagram @USPostalService, X - formerly known as Twitter @USPS, and on Facebook.