Those who want to steal your information will come up with some unusual ways to do so.
Police in Northern New Jersey say thieves are fishing in mailboxes using glue mousetraps and sticky soda bottles to snag checks sitting in the receptacles, WNBC reported.
Ramsey police told residents of Bergen County this week to keep an eye on their accounts if they are using old-fashioned ways to pay their bills - and putting their checks in the mail, WNBC reported.
Those checks don't only have a cash value written on them, they also include a lot of other information valuable to those who want to steal from the innocent -- information like name, address and bank account number, WNBC reported.
Police suggest not mailing personal checks or gift cards and to use electronic bill payment to circumvent the thieves.
Three men were arrested in early September, accused of using the setup to snag mail from a dropbox near the New Milford Post Office, the Bergenfield Daily Voice reported.
Less than a week later, two more men were arrested when police found them parked in a post office parking lot at 1:30 a.m. Police said they found mouse traps with a string glued to them in both cases, the newspaper reported.
It has become such a problem over the past year that in some cities the U.S. Postal Service started installing new mailboxes that have a mechanism that latches onto the letter once it is put in the mailbox. The USPS did not say how the system works, The New Jersey Record reported.
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