Check thefts at blue drop boxes have victims, banks seeing red

A notice on the Cornwall Bridge USPS collection box warns patrons to avoid putting mail in the box after the last posted pick-up time.
Debra A. Aleksinas
A notice on the Cornwall Bridge USPS collection box warns patrons to avoid putting mail in the box after the last posted pick-up time.
CORNWALL — Jim Young didn’t think twice when, on the evening of Dec. 23, he dropped a letter containing a $3,884 check into the iconic blue collection box outside the Cornwall Bridge Post Office.
It was addressed to the Housatonic Valley Rug Shop Inc., located roughly 100 feet away. The check never made it that far.
Instead, a crafty crook, likely under the cloak of darkness, fished that letter, and potentially others, out of the Postal Service drop box. A week later the altered check was cashed in Jamaica, New York.
Young, who owns Sharon Auto Body, wrote a replacement check to cover the purloined one but he is now mired in red tape trying to get reimbursed from his bank, NBT, for his nearly $4,000 loss. He is angry. And he is not alone.
Check fraud is a hot topic these days on a Cornwall neighborhood discussion site.
And in nearby Warren, more than a dozen residents have been victimized by mail theft from home mailboxes and the blue USPS box in the town center, according to First Selectman Greg LaCava, who, last month, posted warnings to residents via the town’s website.
LaCava said he has also been making rounds to the senior center in town to alert seniors and has been conferring with the Connecticut State Police.
One victim, he noted, had deposited mail at the Cornwall Bridge mailbox. In another case, the dollar amount on a check was changed from $500 to $15,000.
“The more I talk about it, the more I hear of other people with the same problem,” Young noted. What angers him the most, he said, is that “the U.S. Post Office has known this has been going on for three months, and they have done zero about it.”
Craig Drozd, postmaster at the Cornwall Bridge Post Office, declined to comment except to confirm that the matter is being handled by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS).
The recent spate of Litchfield County mail thefts is under investigation, said Danielle Schrage, a USPIS inspector and public information officer for Connecticut.
Her agency is the law enforcement and security arm of the United States Postal Service.
“I spoke with the investigators covering those complaints. They are aware and working very closely with the post offices to replace the standard blue collection boxes in those areas,” with newer, high-technology boxes, she reported Jan. 19.
“If there is a blue box with a pull-down handle, a lot of those are being phased out and replaced with newer ones with thinner slots to prevent fishing,” the Schrage noted. “It hasn’t happened yet but will be happening.”
In the meantime, she suggested that postal patrons bring their mail inside the Post Office, or hand it to a carrier on the street. If they must use the blue box, Schrage suggested making the deposit as close to daily pick-up times as possible.
“Don’t let your mail sit in there a minute longer than it needs to. Unfortunately, in this world, we have to give up a little convenience for security,” said the postal inspector. “We don’t live in 1950s Mayberry. We have to be a lot more savvy.”
Schrage advised victims of mail fraud to immediately contact the USPIS at www.uspis.gov/report and fill out a complaint online, or call 877-876-2455, so that the agency can track in real time when and where thefts are taking place and can gather information for criminal prosecution.
“I have been screaming from the rooftop, but a lot of people don’t know we exist as an agency,” said Schrage.
She warned that small, rural towns are easy targets for criminals.
“In some of the bedroom communities, people are a little more complacent. The criminals are not from Litchfield County, they’re coming in and looking for communities that are less savvy” about check fraud.
While check fishing is an age-old crime, it has been surging since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, said postal officials.
The USPS defines check fishing as a line, often with a sticky end, typically rodent glue traps, lowered into a postal box to snag letters and fished back out.
Fraudsters ditch all but the checks, which are then “washed” by changing the payee names, and often the dollar amounts, by removing the ink using chemical agents.
However, in Young’s case, his check was not washed, but completely reprinted with the bank routing number, check number, dollar amount and signature onto a different background.
After about a week of waiting for the check to reach its destination, Young said he went to NBT to void the missing check, only to find out that the $3,884 check had cleared in his account.
According to a recent report by the federal Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, check fraud at depository institutions more than tripled between 2018 and 2022, up 201.2% between those years.
While fishing for checks is a lucrative catch for criminals, it is a nightmare for banks, said Steven Cornell, president and CEO of National Iron Bank (NIB), which has a branch in the Cornwall Bridge section of Cornwall.
Cornell confirmed a “big uptick” in customers from Cornwall reporting check fraud.
“We resolve every one of them very quickly. We go back to all the banks and work with them to get the money back, and except for the big banks, most are very good about it.”
Cornell explained that the Cornwall Bridge branch manager has devoted countless hours helping customers close out breached accounts and opening new ones.
He said it is frustrating that the postal service is unable to secure mail at the expense of the banks:
“It takes a lot of time for us to do this, but there is nothing we can do but resolve it for our customers. They’re doing the right things by using the mail and paying their bills, and then this happens to them. It’s a terrible situation.”
Cornell said one way for customers to deter fraud is to switch from using checks to utilizing the bank’s secure electronic bill-pay system or debit cards. “Everybody who has moved to bill-pay is happy with it.”
Those who can’t part with checks are advised by the USPS to write in permanent ink, which can’t be erased as it penetrates the paper’s fibers.
Young said it could be months before he recoups his loss, but that’s not his main concern.
What he does worry about is that until the blue boxes are secure, his neighbors run the risk of scammers emptying their bank accounts.
Young said he has taken it upon himself to tape laminated warning signs to the Cornwall Bridge USPS collection box, but they are taken down as fast as he posts them.
“Meanwhile, people are putting checks in that box today. It’s that complacency that drives me crazy.”
SHARON — Sharon Dennis Rosen, 83, died on Aug. 8, 2025, in New York City.
Born and raised in Sharon, Connecticut, she grew up on her parents’ farm and attended Sharon Center School and Housatonic Valley Regional High School. She went on to study at Skidmore College before moving to New York City, where she married Dr. Harvey Rosen and together they raised two children.
Sharon’s lifelong love of learning and the arts shaped both her work and her passions. For decades, she served as a tour guide at the American Museum of Natural History and the Asia Society, sharing her knowledge and enthusiasm with countless visitors. She also delighted in traveling widely, immersing herself in other cultures, and especially treasured time spent visiting her daughter and grandsons in Europe and Africa.
She was also deeply connected to her hometown, where in retirement she spent half her time and had many friends. She served as President of the Sharon East Side Cemetery until the time of her death, where generations of her family are buried and where she will also be laid to rest.
She is survived by her husband, Harvey; her children, Jennifer and Marc; and four beloved grandchildren.
Claire and Garland Jeffreys in the film “The King of In Between.”
There is a scene in “The King of In Between,” a documentary about musician Garland Jeffreys, that shows his name as the answer to a question on the TV show “Jeopardy!”
“This moment was the film in a nutshell,” said Claire Jeffreys, the film’s producer and director, and Garland’s wife of 40 years. “Nobody knows the answer,” she continued. “So, you’re cool enough to be a Jeopardy question, but you’re still obscure enough that not one of the contestants even had a glimmer of the answer.”
Garland Jeffreys never quite became a household name, but he carved out a singular place in American music by refusing to fit neatly into any category. A biracial New Yorker blending rock, reggae, soul and R&B, he used genre fusion as a kind of rebellion — against industry pigeonholes, racial boundaries and the musical status quo. Albums like “Ghost Writer” (1977) captured the tension of a post–civil rights America, while songs like “Wild in the Streets” made him an underground prophet of urban unrest. He moved alongside artists like Lou Reed and Bruce Springsteen but always in his own lane — part poet, part agitator, part bridge between cultures.
“I think what I tried to do with the film, wittingly or unwittingly, was just to show that we all have these lives and they don’t often meet our dreams of what we think we’re entitled to, we’re talented enough to get or whatever,” said Claire. “We all have these goals, but we’re sort of stymied. Often, it’s partly circumstance and luck, but it’s also very often something that we’re doing or not doing that’s impeding us.”
This is not the typical rock-and-roll redemption story. There are no smashed guitars, no heroic overdoses, no dramatic comeback tour. What we get instead is something quieter and more intimate: hours of archival footage that Claire spent years sorting through. The sheer effort behind the film is palpable — so much so that, as she admitted with a laugh, it cured her of any future ambitions in filmmaking.
“What I learned with this project was A, I’m never doing it again. It was just so hard. And B, you know, you can do anything if you collaborate with people that know what they’re doing.”
Claire worked with the editing team of Evan M. Johnson and Ben Sozanski and a slew of talented producers, and ended up with a truthful portrayal — a beautiful living document for Garland’s legions of fans and, perhaps most importantly, for the couple’s daughter, Savannah.
“She’s been in the audience with me maybe three or four times,” said Claire. “The last time, I could tell that she was beginning to feel very proud of the effort that went into it and also of being a part of it.”
Savannah pursued a career in music for a while herself but has changed tracks and become a video producer.
“I think she couldn’t quite see music happening for herself,” said Claire. “She was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to struggle the way I saw my dad struggling and I’m going to get a job with a salary.’”
The film doesn’t just track the arc of an underappreciated musician, however. The music, always playing, is the soundtrack of a life — of a man navigating racial, musical and personal boundaries while balancing marriage, parenthood, aging, addiction andrecovery. Garland and Claire speak plainly about getting sober in the film, a life choice that gave them both clarity and shows Claire as a co-conspirator in his survival.
“I did some work early on with a director,” said Claire. “He wanted the final cut, and I didn’t feel like I could do that — not because I wanted so much to control the story, but I didn’t want the story to be about Alzheimer’s.”
Diagnosed in 2017, Garland, now 81, is in the late stages of the disease. Claire serves as his primary caregiver. The film quietly acknowledges his diagnosis, but it doesn’t dwell — a restraint that feels intentional. Garland spent a career refusing to be reduced: not to one sound, one race or one scene. And so the documentary grants him that same dignity in aging. His memory may be slipping, but the film resists easy sentimentality. Instead, it shows what remains — his humor, his voice, his marriage, the echo of a life lived on the edges of fame and at the center of his own convictions.
The Moviehouse in Millerton will be screening “The King of In Between” on Sept. 20 at 7 p.m. Peter Aaron, arts editor of Chronogram Magazine will conduct a talkback and Q&A with Claire Jeffreys after the film. Purchase tickets at themoviehouse.net.
The Haystack Book Festival, a program of the Norfolk Hub, brings renowned writers and thinkers to Norfolk for conversation. Celebrating its fifth season this fall, the festival will gather 18 writers for discussions at the Norfolk Library on Sept. 20 and Oct. 3 through 5.
Jerome A. Cohen, author of the memoir “Eastward, Westward: A Lifein Law.”Haystack Book Festival
For example, “Never Take the Rule of Law for Granted: China and the Dissident,” will be held Saturday, Sept. 20, at 4 p.m. at the Norfolk Library. It brings together Jerome A. Cohen, author of “Eastward, Westward: A Life in Law,” and Mark Clifford, author of “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong King’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic” in dialogue with journalist Richard Hornik to discuss the rule of law and China.
The Council on Foreign Relations stated, “Few Americans have done more than Jerome A. Cohen to advance the rule of law in East Asia. He established the study of Chinese law in the United States. An advocate for human rights, Cohen has been a scholar, teacher, lawyer, and activist for sixty years.”
Cohen, a professor at New York University School of Law and director of its U.S.-Asia Law Institute, revealed his long view on China: “We are now witnessing another extreme in the pendulum’s swing toward repression. Xi Jinping is likely to outlive me but ‘no life lives forever.’ There will eventually be another profound reaction to the current totalitarian era.”
Mark Clifford, author of “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic.”Haystack Book Festival
In “The Troublemaker,” Clifford chronicles Lai’s life from child refugee to pro-democracy billionaire to his current imprisonment by the Chinese Communist Party. Clifford is president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, a Walter Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University, and holds a PhD in history from the University of Hong Kong. He was the former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post and The Standard (Hong Kong and Seoul).
Journalist Richard Hornik, adjunct senior fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu.Haystack Book Festival
Richard Hornik, adjunct senior fellow at the East-West Center, will moderate the discussion. Hornik is the former executive editor of AsiaWeek, news service director of Time magazine, and former Time bureau chief in Warsaw, Boston, Beijing and Hong Kong.
Betsy Lerner, author of “Shred Sisters,” is giving the 2025 Brendan Gill lecture at the Haystack Book Festival.Haystack Book Festival
The Brendan Gill Lecture is a highlight of the festival honoring longtime Norfolk resident Brendan Gill, who died in1997. Gill wrote for The New Yorker magazine for fifty years. Betsy Lerner, New York Times-recognized author of “Shred Sisters,” will deliver this year’s lecture on Friday, Oct. 3, at 6 p.m. at the Norfolk Library.
Visit haystackbookfestival.org to register. Admission is free.