> stolen out of her mailbox at the Los Alamos Post Office
All the P.O. mailboxes I've ever seen have locks. What's going on? Was the thief actually a USPS employee?
All the P.O. mailboxes I've ever seen have locks. What's going on? Was the thief actually a USPS employee?
Back in high school a friend was obsessed with the MTA subway and had a neighbor who was an MTA employee. He somehow convinced them to hand over their keys which had both the strait and S shaped ward keys to the subway cars and the pad locks in the stations. He duplicated the warded keys using nails and sheet metal and the padlock key using just a nail and a file. We both had sets of keys and could unlock anything we wanted. All it took was one irresponsible employee handing their keys to a 16 YO.
Ideally, they're in a building and back-loaded, in which case, they might not even be closed on the backside. Because access to the back is secured.
But for other types of boxes, like outdoor boxes, there's usually another lock along the frame that causes the entire front (or back, depending) to swing open so the mail carrier can efficiently deliver to multiple boxes.
Sometimes not even. As a semi-related personal story, many years ago in university some friends and I set out to reverse-engineer the master keys.
All it took was buying 10x of the same blank from an online retailer for ~$12, cutting 6/7 positions to the same dephs of our dorm keys, then iterating the last remaining position down one depth at a time (starting from a 0-cut) in the last remaining position.
Rinse and repeat until we had iterated all 7 positions across our 7 sacrificial blanks, and with a little napkin math, we were left with the bitting for the TMK. Cut the TMK bitting onto a new blank, and we now had the literal keys to the kingdom.
Many harmless fun times were had, steam tunnels, roofs, and penthouses explored, but had we been actually malicious the potential for damage or theft would have been huge.
I think those with the skills and smarts to perform sophisticated attacks typically set their sights higher in life than petty burglary, with most actual burglars resorting to more simple means like brute-force and violence.
I'd be very surprised if these burglars picked locks on the mailboxes or duplicated postal keys instead of having found some dumb bypass born due to a simple oversight in the mailbox's design.
Most of those should be explicitly open anyway. If a steam tunnel isn't safe for a few students to be in maintenance should need extra training to enter it as well. Roofs are too valuable spaces to make off limits (this is a rant should apply to all flat-top buildings). A penthouse might be a private space if so stay out, but many of them serve public functions at a university and should be open.
Many of the ones with backs still have keyed fronts; apartment complexes are notorious for front-access break-ins.