What do you do when you’re a postal service that, in spite of enjoying a legal monopoly on delivering certain types of mail, has troubles making ends meet but also enjoy the immunity that generally comes with being a government agency? You commit fraud, of course:
She told CBS46 her former supervisors at the post office gave her specific instructions to misrepresent delivery times because, she says, they know what’s at stake if Amazon packages are late.
“At 7:15, whatever you have not delivered, pull your truck over to the side of the road and scan every single one of your amazon packages. We cannot have late packages because that will jeopardize our contract with Amazon,” said the former mail carrier.
CBS46 drove around and found a current mail carrier working in a different county who attested to the claims. She also asked to be kept anonymous.
“Basically, we have to falsify the timing, and a lot of carriers don’t want to do that, but we’re mandated to with a direct order,” she said.
While these carriers admit the official records at the post office are being tampered with, their advice to customers is this:
If you know for a fact that your package came late, make a complaint and stand your ground. Most of the handheld scanners that carriers use have GPS records that can be looked up if it comes down to it.
First, the United States Postal Service (USPS) is defrauding the people who ordered the packages because if the package is delivered after 20:00 they get a free month of Amazon Prime. Second, it’s defrauding Amazon by lying about when packages are being delivered. Since the USPS is a government agency there likely isn’t anything Amazon or its customers can do other than stop using USPS in areas where these practices are happening. Even then neither party can stop doing business with USPS entirely because it enjoys a monopoly on delivering certain types of mail. And the USPS has no motivation to fight these kinds of fraudulent practices because it’s a government agency and fraud is the status quo for them.