United States Postal Service [USPS]

Unfortunately, I was a first-time victim of stolen gifts this year. Several boxes I sent to different parts of the country arrived missing several items and had things replaced instead of the original hand-made/sentimental gifts I sent.

In one case a basil seedling plant was stolen and replaced with a blue book value on motorcycles and ATV’s… the gift was actually taped back up with this instead! Luckily my family thought this was fishy and called to ask me about it, otherwise I would never have known. This tipped me off to call and check on everything else and resulted in a very melancholy Christmas day as the amount of stolen items grew. (It was my first Christmas living away from home and it really added to the grief.)

It breaks my heart that you cannot trust the postal service. This had to happen here in LA because things were mailed to different locations. At this point it is only my word against theirs, but nothing was worth much retail value… just sentimental value, so I declined additional insurance when they asked. When I did so, the postal worker said, “Your loss” which I guess she meant! Considering I mailed everything way ahead of time and nothing was of much retail value, I thought this was a safe bet.

Since this is a federal fraud, the more instances they find of similar crimes will result in a greater punishment. Any attention you could possibly help me bring to this circumstance would be immensely appreciated, as I’m sure I was not the only victim.

It’s hard to imagine anyone could sleep at night after stealing gifts with only sentimental value, but I guess anything is possible during these hard economic times.