Mail thieves steal 92-year-old’s name, money – even her address

Crime doesn’t pay?

Modesto resident Helen Woods, 92, and her son, David, don’t seem convinced of that right now. Not with Helen having been victimized a few times in the past month by mail theft and identity theft.

“It’s amazing how simple it is to steal something, with no accountability,” David Woods said, sitting in his mother’s north Modesto home last week.

For one, Helen was sent a card from her bank, Bank of the West, thanking her for signing up for online banking. Problem was, she hadn’t. “She calls the bank and she goes, ‘I don’t have a computer,’ ” David said. “At that point, these people, these responsibles, already have withdrawn $300 from her account through the online banking account.”

David, whose name also is on his mother’s account, went to the bank for information: the email that was used to start the online banking, the cell phone number the person used and the name associated with the phone number. “They’d also started a PayPal account using her online banking, so we got that stopped,” he said.

Next up, Helen’s mail stopped arriving at her home on or around March 23, David said. Most people have a day, sometimes two, when they get no mail, but already on alert because of the bank fraud, David quickly talked with his mother’s mail carrier. He was told she had filed a change of address and her mail now was going to an apartment on the 2400 block of Prescott Road.

David reversed the address change, but “the disconcerting point of this is that anyone can get your address and forward your mail to their address. ... They don’t require any identification, they don’t require anything.”

An address change can be done by filling out a card available at post offices. The form requires a signature but there’s no indication if or how it’s determined to be authentic. The form comes in an envelope that says the change of address also can be made at the Postal Service’s website, USPS.com.

The criminals struck again when they got hold of a check Helen mailed out to the city of Modesto to pay a bill. It was made out for $99.47, but the crooks simply added one more “9” and, where the amount is spelled out, changed “Ninety-Nine and 47/100 to “Nine Ninety-Nine and 47/100.”

The name of the payee has been changed to something the Woodses can’t even read. It might say “Virginia” something.

“How they cashed that check – who’s it made out to, you can’t even tell?” Helen said about the check, which was deposited at Golden One Credit Union. “… And they got the money. I don’t know whether they went to the credit union or to an ATM.”

David said he can’t understand why banks aren’t more proactive in cases like this. “Obviously, the check is fraudulent and I can’t believe they’d pay the funding on that without going back to the person who wrote it.”

Helen suspects all of this may have begun the day she answered her door to find a woman there who said her Uncle Jimmy had died and she was there to pick up his things. “I said, ‘There’s no Uncle Jimmy here,’ ” Helen recalled. “So she turned around and looked at the mailbox. I probably had that one check going out to the city of Modesto in there that day.”

David knows his mother is far from alone in being preyed upon because she’s perceived as an easy target. “If they’re casing these neighborhoods, there’s a lot of older people in these neighborhoods,” he said. Regarding the bogus change of address that took his mother’s mail, he added, “My guess is if they did any kind of a search, they’re gonna find there’s other mail going to this same address from other people.”

David, who’s president of the Stanislaus Consolidated Fire Protection District board, said he filed a report with the Modesto Police Department. He provided names, phone numbers and addresses associated with the Prescott Road apartment where the mail was forwarded and with the online banking account that was opened. He said he was told it could be several weeks before there’s anything to report.

“I went to the post office and asked them about fraud,” he added, “and basically they said, ‘We want the big boys.’ ”

David said he’s alerted his mom’s neighbors to what happened and taken steps to protect her. There’s a new, locking mailbox fastened to the wall on her porch. But it’s for incoming mail only – all outgoing mail is delivered to the post office. Because his mom doesn’t use the Internet, paying her bills online would fall to him, and he’s not quite there yet. “We’ve changed some techniques,” he said, “but it’s hard to change old habits.”

This story was originally published April 24, 2017 at 2:32 PM with the headline "Mail thieves steal 92-year-old’s name, money – even her address."