On June 19th 2007 I had a VERY bad day. I received a package from one of my colleagues that was cataloguing a group of coins for me and it arrived empty. The thing is, there was supposed to be roughly $15,000 in coins (my cost) in the package.
Someone had slit the package, removed the contents and put some white tape over the slit. Unfortunately the package was not insured and was not sent via Registered Mail (first and LAST time we make that mistake).
It does not take much of an imagination to guess what my reaction was. First I got sick to my stomach, next I ran down to the Post Office and spoke to one of the managers. Long story short, I made my way down to the Postal Inspectors office where I filed a report and figured I would never see my coins again.
Something unexpected happened though. Several months later I receive a call from the Agent in charge of my case, asking me if I could identify my coins. Someone called and reported that they had received coins with my website address on them and when he went to the site, the photos of the coins on the site were the coins in his possession. Did he buy them from some guy off of the street? Or off of an online auction? Nope. He purchased them from the United States Postal Service.
Yup. The Postal Service is in the business of “fencing” stolen or lost goods on a regular basis. (I say it this way because in MY case they CLEARLY could have identified the actual owner and should have per their own rules- thus, they “fenced” stolen goods) There is a little known department in the Postal Service named the Mail Recovery Center. The Mail Recovery Center is responsible for finding the owners of lost mail and if they can not find the owners they sell it at an auction in Atlanta. They are SUPPOSED to check the contents for contact information and check reports for thefts or those nifty forms you fill out when you lose a package. Obviously they do not do their job very well, I had not only filed a report at the Post Office, but I also had a criminal case open for the theft. What was even better is that most of the coins in the package had my filps in them with my web address and telephone number.
The best that could be determined from the records they had and what we pieced together, someone in one of the centers that handles Priority Mail cut open the package to steal, freaked out when he realized how valuable it was and tossed the contents behind a machine. A few months later someone finds it and throws it in a bin where it ends up at the Recovery Center.
Eventually I got back about 80% of my coins. Because I had filed a report that they were stolen, they had to make good with the guy that purchased them at the auction, because they were STOLEN GOODS. But it ended there. The USPS had no obligation to make good on what was not recovered so I received a very expensive lesson.
If you have ever lost a coin in the mail (and lately I have been losing a LOT of outgoing packages) chances are it will end up on eBay. Yup. Most of the people that bid on those HUGH bins of lost and/or stolen goods turn around and sell them on eBay. What’s even better, is that if you insured the package, you basically SOLD the contents to the US Postal Service when you paid for the insurance, WHETHER OR NOT you are compensated for the loss. (If they determine that there are grounds NOT to pay a claim, they still own the contents because of their rules) What I found even more amazing is that the guy that called the Postal Inspector about my coins did not have to do so. Although the coins were reported stolen, he apparently received clear title to them when he paid for the lot he won and in conversations with the inspector told him that every once in a while someone complains to eBay or the police that he is selling stolen goods, etc.
