#REQUEST USPS MAIL FORWARDING FORM 2018 VERIFICATION#

In a particularly comical case from 2017, an Atlanta resident was arrested for cashing checks that he had rerouted from the corporate headquarters of shipping giant UPS, resulting in literal bathtubs of mail piling up outside the hapless fraudster’s apartment. Not only is this flaw not new, it’s widely documented. But these letters can, and are, easily missed, and the letters themselves do not require customer attention or interaction, only if the person wants to “view or cancel” an unauthorized change of address request. Once a form is handed in and processed, USPS sends out two letters, one letter to the old address and another to the new address, notifying the resident that the change of address went through. That is the simple flaw that fraudsters exploit in order to hijack home addresses, steal their credit cards and wreak havoc on their bank accounts. But besides a notice on the reverse side warning that filling out the form with false information could result in criminal charges (if caught), there are no guarantees that USPS will check the identity of the person submitting a paper change of address form. The last thing is to sign the form, and hand it back to a postal worker or drop it in the letter mail slot inside the post office.

You have to request the postcard-sized form at a USPS post office, which we did - for journalism! The person then fills it out with their name, old address, new address and for how long they want to reroute their mail. As bureaucratic as government paperwork goes, this form is both refreshingly simple and remarkably dull. The paper form is officially known as PS Form 3575. But USPS relies almost entirely on the system trusting the person signing the paper form, whoever they might be.Īfter filling out this form, there are no guarantees that USPS will check the identity of the person submitting the change of address request.

#REQUEST USPS MAIL FORWARDING FORM 2018 VERIFICATION#

The online form, at least, requires a small payment, which is by no means verification of a person’s identity, but it leaves a digital paper trail that makes it ultimately traceable to someone. Neither online or paper form requires the person to present proof of their identity. The other way - still used by a significant minority of folks - is by filling out the paper form at a local USPS post office.

Most people fill out the form online by providing their old and new address, then pay $1.10 for the convenience of speed. USPS processed some 36 million changes of address in 2021. All of this, he says, is because of a simple paper form that gets handed back to the post office without much of a second thought. But by his own admission, the former executive said he did not know it was so easy for someone to maliciously change his address without his consent, let alone open the doors for criminals to raid his accounts or potentially rack up thousands of dollars in fraudulent purchases. The former Microsoft executive, who asked not to be named but agreed to tell his story to TechCrunch, is not naïve to cybersecurity and privacy threats. But while USPS acknowledges there is a problem, it wouldn’t say how it plans to close the loophole that allows fraudsters to cash in on someone else’s identity. What is more baffling is that there seems to be an equally simple fix. A fraudulently filed change of address form can have lasting fallout for the thousands of individuals whose mail is hijacked and rerouted every year, with criminals able to obtain bills, credit cards and other sensitive information that can be used to raid bank accounts or make fraudulent purchases. It’s neither new nor a particularly sophisticated technique, and has long been known to fraudsters and federal investigators.

Postal Service processes changes of address. The fraud relies on a simple flaw in how the U.S. That was enough to set in motion a domino effect that upended the life of a former Microsoft executive several states away, as the person who signed the form effectively hijacked the executive’s home address in just a few minutes. The person signed the form, handed it in and walked out. post office and filled out a change of address form, just as tens of millions do each year to route their mail to a new address. Sometime in November, someone walked into a U.S.

Request usps mail forwarding form 2018