I had the exact same question. This seems like a much bigger crime than the story is letting on. Also, shouldn't this be handled at least jointly by a federal agency? I didn't see any mention of federal charges.

I feel like fucking with the Post Office is one of those things that sounds minor but can be a big fucking deal. Your petty theft just became a literal federal case, complete with a police force whose whole job is to protect the integrity of the mail.

The "key" which opens the entire PO Box "front" is extremely easy to obtain; and if you don't have one, a crowbar/lockpicks [used just once] will simultaneously open entire ~250 box panels.

I know many apartment building mailboxes have a front key, but shouldn't PO Boxes at the post office be filled from the BACK?

Not every post office has a "back," albeit many due.

Many of the ones with backs still have keyed fronts; apartment complexes are notorious for front-access break-ins.

Just do a search for "The Lock Picking Lawyer," you'll have loads of fun seeing what he can do, sometimes with the most minimal of tools (like a thin strip of metal cut from a soda can).

The locks have keys which are stolen: https://www.scrippsnews.com/us-news/us-mail-theft-often-begi...

Some mailboxes at least used to have a common key. Alternately it's probably not that difficult to pick the lock.

my condo building was hit once by someone who stole a USPS master key...

Aren't there two locks? One, a master keyed lock for post office employees to fill the boxes and the other is individually keyed for customer access. Perhaps the crooks obtained a master key by either bribing an employee, cloned one, or stole one.

Back in high school a friend was obsessed with the MTA subway and had a neighbor who was an MTA employee. He somehow convinced them to hand over their keys which had both the strait and S shaped ward keys to the subway cars and the pad locks in the stations. He duplicated the warded keys using nails and sheet metal and the padlock key using just a nail and a file. We both had sets of keys and could unlock anything we wanted. All it took was one irresponsible employee handing their keys to a 16 YO.

> All it took was one irresponsible employee handing their keys to a 16 YO.

Sometimes not even. As a semi-related personal story, many years ago in university some friends and I set out to reverse-engineer the master keys.

All it took was buying 10x of the same blank from an online retailer for ~$12, cutting 6/7 positions to the same dephs of our dorm keys, then iterating the last remaining position down one depth at a time (starting from a 0-cut) in the last remaining position.

Rinse and repeat until we had iterated all 7 positions across our 7 sacrificial blanks, and with a little napkin math, we were left with the bitting for the TMK. Cut the TMK bitting onto a new blank, and we now had the literal keys to the kingdom.

Many harmless fun times were had, steam tunnels, roofs, and penthouses explored, but had we been actually malicious the potential for damage or theft would have been huge.

I think those with the skills and smarts to perform sophisticated attacks typically set their sights higher in life than petty burglary, with most actual burglars resorting to more simple means like brute-force and violence.

I'd be very surprised if these burglars picked locks on the mailboxes or duplicated postal keys instead of having found some dumb bypass born due to a simple oversight in the mailbox's design.

> steam tunnels, roofs, and penthouses explored,

Most of those should be explicitly open anyway. If a steam tunnel isn't safe for a few students to be in maintenance should need extra training to enter it as well. Roofs are too valuable spaces to make off limits (this is a rant should apply to all flat-top buildings). A penthouse might be a private space if so stay out, but many of them serve public functions at a university and should be open.

In the real world if urban colleges leave those spaces unlocked then random people who aren't even students will use them to sleep or get high. Have some sympathy for the maintenance staff who just want to do their jobs and keep the campus running without a lot of hassle.

It depends on the setup.

Ideally, they're in a building and back-loaded, in which case, they might not even be closed on the backside. Because access to the back is secured.

But for other types of boxes, like outdoor boxes, there's usually another lock along the frame that causes the entire front (or back, depending) to swing open so the mail carrier can efficiently deliver to multiple boxes.

Most PO Box locks can be opened and then closed without trace with a flathead screwdriver. They’re usually just cheap little insert locks held in place by a nut.

A LOT of locks out there are pathetically easy to bypass even by an amateur picker.

Locks keep honest people honest. They are pretty universally easy to bypass if you are willing to put a little work into it.