CHICAGO — A Chicago man is fuming after five graduation cards containing small cash gifts arrived at their destinations ripped open, with money missing from inside.
The retiree said he intentionally went inside the Uptown post office, 4850 North Broadway, to mail the cards because he doesn’t trust the big blue mailboxes on the street. He dropped all five cards into a mail slot inside the building on May 24. Each contained a $20 gift for his graduating relatives.
Days later, the cards arrived at their destinations—one in suburban Dallas and four in a town outside Charlotte, NC. They were all torn open, and the cash was missing, the man said Friday.
“We have sent mail before (not with money) and dropped it in the blue mailboxes on the street that have either never arrived or arrived over a month late,” the man explained, “so we always go inside to mail now.”
The man said he filed a complaint at the Uptown branch, and the employee was “serious and nice and did not blow us off.”
She “accepted when I asserted that the common factor was THIS post office,” he said. “She said she would pass it on to the postmaster.”
A postal official who spoke with CWBChicago stated the thefts were likely committed internally in Chicagoland before the envelopes went their separate ways to Texas and North Carolina.
They pointed out that cash and gift cards are often tucked away inside cards that, thanks to their brightly colored envelopes and recognizable dimensions, are easy to spot among the piles of mail processed each day.
The whole thing is a real annoyance for the adoring grandfather and granduncle, whose cash went missing.
“I know this isn’t a major theft or anything,” he said, “but for chrissakes, Americans have trusted the US Mail back to the Pony Express days.”
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