BLOOMFIELD, NJ — The Bloomfield Police Department arrested a suspect last week for “mail fishing,” a crime increasingly seen in north Jersey whereby a suspect removes envelopes from a mailbox and fraudulently cashes any checks.
The arrest was made Tuesday, May 8, outside the post office at 1296 Broad St., shortly after midnight.
According to Lt. Patsy Spatola, Johan Lake-Rodriguez, 26, of Paterson, was arrested after surveillance by Detective Jennifer Horn and Detective Susan Looges. In neighboring Glen Ridge, four arrests were recently made for mail fishing and a fifth arrest for receiving stolen checks, fraud and conspiracy for both. However, in those arrests, the burglary tool was a sticky substance at the end of a pole. With the Bloomfield incident, a pry was used.
“When Glen Ridge made the arrests,” Spatola said, “they had some checks from Bloomfield. So, we figured we better jump on it.”
Two suspects and a van were observed by Horn and Looges. One suspect was captured, but the second suspect escaped on foot. Spatola was confident that individual would be apprehended, too. Inside the van, envelopes were found. Checks totaling more than $1,200 were recovered.
In one of the Glen Ridge arrests, two suspects were apprehended on April 17 when mailboxes contained checks to the IRS. The suspects had $116,000 in allegedly stolen checks from a mailbox on Ridgewood Avenue and Glen Ridge Parkway. Spatola explained what is done with the recovered mail.
“We have to send them out to the State Police,” he said. “We have the return addresses. We have to have them processed and we keep the envelope as evidence.”
The other parts of the mail are returned to the sender. The whole process is done as expeditiously as possible.
“I sent them driven right down to the State Police lab in Totowa,” he said. “We notified everyone of what we did.”
Spatola said the suspects did not use a sticky substance to remove the mail on Broad Street. They were observed using a pry bar to open the mailbox. Lake-Rodriquez was charged with theft, criminal mischief, fraud and conspiracy to commit these crimes.
Spatola said he has been on the force for almost 25 years, but mail fishing is something new for these parts.
“I haven’t seen this before,” he said. “In other states, but last year in New Jersey.”
Lake-Rodriguez also appears in a bank video fraudulently cashing several checks. He was charged with forgery and has been remanded to the Essex County Correctional Facility.
“We have over 50 victims and subpoenas,” Spatola said. “It’s on-going.”
What a suspect usually does with a stolen check, he said, is use a fraudulent ATM account to cash it and then withdraw the money.
“If you have a check for a utility, a teller won’t cash that,” he said.
Greg Kliemisch, public information officer for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, said that a check’s ink can also be “washed” of pertinent information, reassigned, and cashed illegally.
He said fishers have also been known to fraudulently cash checks through banking services that accept a photograph of the check. For someone to protect their mail from being fished from a mailbox, authorities recommend delivering it directly to the post office. If you must use a mailbox located on the street, deposit the mail before the scheduled last pickup so your mail is not in the box all night when fishers come out.
Another scheme used by a fisher is to spread a sticky substance inside the mailbox door so that mail can be “hooked” by the glue and later stolen.
About the Author
