An investigator with the U.S. Postal Service is looking into a number of break-ins at mailboxes in central Virginia that occurred this weekend.
On Monday, Postal Service investigator Michael Romano said the organization was alerted to a group of mailboxes within a 30-mile radius in the Richmond, Virginia, area that “had been tampered with.”
“It appears that we’ve had some level of mail stolen from these blue collection boxes,” Romano said.
The break-ins happened a month before Election Day and during a time of heightened skepticism about the validity of using the Postal Service to transport election ballots.
Romano urged caution about tying the break-ins to the election because there is no evidence that they are. He said most break-ins are crimes of opportunities in which criminals seek personal gain.
“I don’t have any information [about] whether the boxes contain any sort of election mail,” Romano said. “If we have any indication that it is, sort of, election fraud-related, we are going to work closely with our counterparts at the Federal Bureau of Investigation to determine what type of theft we have and aggressively investigate this case.”
The Virginia Department of Elections said it does not have any information on whether any pieces of the stolen mail were documents related to the election.
Romano asked that anyone with information about the break-ins call the Postal Inspection Service hotline at 1-877-876-2455.
