Crime
Mail Fail at Scale
Published June 28, 2026 | 5 min read
Thieves are going postal on Brownstone Brooklyn.
They’re swiping checks from mailboxes and likely at Post Offices in a sudden surge of swindles, say residents, community leaders and bank staff in Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens.
“These scams are running rampant,” said Peter Lanfranca, president of the 84th Precinct Council in Brooklyn Heights, noting that thieves typically use glue or fishing line to extract envelopes with checks from street boxes, then scrub off the name of the recipient and replace it with their own.
Lanfranca said he himself was victimized after he mailed a check to Con Edison and someone stole it. “I lost a couple thousand dollars,” he said.
Residents echoed that sentiment, including a married senior couple who said they both were victimized after dropping off envelopes with checks into a blue mailbox on the corner of 1st Place and Court Street in Carroll Gardens. They asked not to be identified in this story to protect their privacy.
An insurance company staffer said she and her brother were hit. The brother was notified by his bank that someone had taken a check, then changed the name of the recipient and the amount. “They got him for $9,000,” said his sister.
This reporter had a close call. He was contacted by a Citibank fraud prevention agent and asked if he’d made out a check to a man whose name the reporter didn’t recognize. The agent said a teller in Queens became suspicious about the check and alerted a bank supervisor, noting that the man was still in the branch. “Do you want us to arrest him?” he was asked.
Bank employees at five branches on Court Street from downtown Brooklyn to Carroll Gardens said they’ve been dealing with a spike of complaints about checks being taken.
“It’s happening a lot,” said a bank worker in Cobble Hill who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
A survey of mailboxes in Carroll Gardens revealed that five of them — all located on northwest corners on Court Street — had a sticky substance in or around the opening slot for letters. The boxes were at President Street, 1st Place, 3rd Place, 4th Place and Huntington Street.
There’s concern that checks that do make it to a local Post Office branch could be at risk.
On June 29 the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office announced the indictment of former US Postal Service employee Bianca Graham, 30, on grand larceny, conspiracy and other charges after authorities said she and an accomplice, Sean Campbell, stole more than $25,000 in rent checks from the Borough Park Post Office in 2024 and 2025. A third suspect was not caught.
But check stealing was not discussed when cops and residents met on June 3 for the monthly gathering of the 76th Precinct Council, which focused on concerns about break-ins of businesses in Carroll Gardens.
Afterward, council president Jerry Armer said thefts of checks from street mailboxes have plagued the neighborhood for years.
“The advice has always been to not drop checks in the mailboxes,” he said. “Stay online.”
The problem is not a local one.
Last year the FBI and US Postal Service issued a joint warning that check fraud had spiked, with reports of suspicious activity nearly doubling from 2021 to 2023, rising from 350,000 to 680,000.
They cited thefts of checks left in residential mailboxes and blue collection boxes, but noted that checks were also stolen in burglaries at USPS facilities and in robberies of postal workers. Bribery and collusion of USPS employees was also a problem, according to the report.
Once in the hands of a scam artist, a check can be altered by acid washing, which uses acetone or bleach to remove the original payee and alters the dollar amount, said the warning. Checks can also be “cooked”: thieves use editing software and high-tech printers to create blank checks from an existing account.
“Fraudsters take advantage of regulations requiring financial institutions to make check funds available within specific timeframes, which is often too short a window for the consumer or financial institutions to identify and stop the fraud,” said the warning.
