Joliet's Criminals Target Post Office Boxes On McDonough

JOLIET, IL — At last week's Joliet City Council meeting, Police Chief Bill Evans made it clear that financial fraud, particularly involving the stealing of mail, continues to undergo a dramatic increase in crime around Joliet. This past weekend, Joliet's criminals orchestrated another theft, targeting the Joliet Post Office at 2000 McDonough Street.

According to Joliet police spokesman Dwayne English, officers were called to the Joliet Post Office around 1:25 a.m. Officers learned the outside mailboxes had been burglarized.

Officers determined that mail had been removed from four outdoor United States Postal Service mail drop boxes sometime within the last two hours, English noted. None of the mailboxes appeared to be forced open. This incident remains under investigation, he added.

In last week's Joliet Patch article, Evans noted that "burglaries was slightly up, but not by much. Motor vehicle theft is fortunately down about 13 percent. We have a decrease in criminal sexual assaults, we have a decrease in robberies. We also had a decrease in aggravated assaults."

Crimes involving bank fraud, on the other hand, are up substantially, Evans said.
Joliet police are seeing a great number of older residents falling victims to bank transaction crimes as a result of mailing checks of large amounts of money.

These checks are intercepted at the post office, washed and cashed by the identity thief, often, for even larger amounts of money, he said.

"That's something we saw a pretty drastic increase in," Evans remarked.