Mail continues to be stolen out of Sanford neighborhood

SEMINOLE COUNTY, Fla. — Kensington Reserve in Seminole county is a beautiful neighborhood closed off from the main road by a gate - but somehow, mail is being stolen from their mailboxes.

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Pamela Harmon is one of the people who live there.

Her bills, magazines and piles of junk mail always seem to make to her mailbox, but her gift cards and cash don’t.

She thought maybe that it was a fluke.

Read: 9 Investigates: ‘Arrow Key’ thefts impact Central Florida communities well beyond where they occur

“I was expecting two birthday cards back in early November, and both were sent from Augusta, Georgia, and they both appeared on my dashboard, and neither one got delivered,” Harmon said. “One of them had a gift card, the other had a $100 bill.” They never got delivered.

Documentation shows it was received at the post office, but never made it to her mailbox.

She wasn’t the only one - WTFV has a list of a dozen residents that said the same thing has been happening for about two years.

Harmon and others have been trying to get the postal service to investigate.

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“I filed a report, and I received the same kind of response. oh, We’re so sorry. We’re not perfect. We make mistakes,” Harmon said.

So, she tested the system, sending things to herself to see if she would get them this time.

“I was trying to catch these people,” Harmon added.

Here in this neighborhood, they have the cluster mailboxes, which are the same kind of mailboxes Channel 9 has been telling you about - the universal arrow keys are being stolen from mail carriers.

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9 Investigates told you that USPS has been aware of these attacks since before the pandemic and is only now hardening efforts to better secure blue mailboxes around the country, but the people caught in the middle of these crimes are still exposed.

We don’t know if that is the case here, because our email to the postal service asking how this is happening and what can, if anything they will do about it was ignored.

Folks in Tallahassee have complained so much about their mail issues, including missing letters and packages, that the postal service just sent in auditors to find out what is going on.

In Sanford, they would like to see something like that done here.

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