Telegram is prone to online forums that become the bulk of postal crime. Sometimes they create a market online for stolen goods. It becomes a place for criminals to pass on their crimes. 1200 subscribers of the Telegram channel called ‘UPDATE’ hosted by Liam Neeson is one of the many.
The account attracted everyone’s attention by posting a series of uncashed checks for sale. The variety of those checks blow mind. It includes a $67 electric company bill, $129 DMV fees, and a $10 donation for South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott. USPS (U.S. Postal Service) provided a date from March 2020 to February 2021, that mail theft complaints raised crazily by 161%.
David Maimon, a sociology professor at Georgia State University conducts a massive investigation. He took thousands of social media channels, group chats, as well as dark websites to find criminal patterns. He has done this in two years. Only in six months he found a threefold increase on stolen checks in the online market. Missing checks from mailboxes is subject to theft.
In the channel he monitors, he found 1200 stolen checks from Texas and around 750 each from Florida and New York. Prof. Maimon argued that the channel host does not hide at all, they are brazen thieves. They took photos of the piled money. Before, their data was confidential for the public.
They even stole letters in a getaway car. The letters are stacks of mail falling out og the back seat. It sorts through mail strewn across apartment floors for seeking valuable material inside. Apparently the criminals gain illicit access to actual envelopes. They commonly begin with a designated event that has decades worth of postal customers.
