Hacking Business Reply Mail | Hacker News Reader

Hacking Business Reply Mail

denis.papathanasiou.org

Nice one! Try this one. When I was living in NY, I'd always want to bring a magazine for the long subway ride downtown. So one day I took one of the magazines that get delivered to my home and enjoyed the read on the way downtown. When I got to my destination I'd just pop the magazine in the nearest mailbox. Usually a day later it would delivered back safely back home to be read another day. I've done this dozens of times without fail.

I moved from Austin to Houston almost ten years ago. Was good friends with my Austin mailman, who lived down the block.

About a month after we moved, I got a package in the mail - a cardboard mailing tube, containing a poster, that I'd bought online a couple of years before but never gotten around to putting up. But how did it end up back in the mail?

It turns out that during one of our move trips, the poster was left leaning against the outside wall on the front porch at the Austin house, next to the mailbox.

Our mailman saw it, assumed that it had been (recently) delivered by another postman on his day off, and he knew that we had a forwarding order in place. So he put the poster back in the system with our Houston address on it (being properly packaged and all) and I got it a few days later.

This story goes to show that sometimes the most important "hacking" of any system is to be in good graces with the people running it.

Or to just be nice to people in general, and eventually good karma will come back to you. I give cold bottled water to the Jehovah's Witnesses that come around every year in the heat of the summer, I make sure and thank and leave cards w/small gifts for my UPS and FedEx regular drivers and postpeople/mailpeople, etc.

Even yelling "Thank you!" through my front window (near my computer desk) when the UPS guy drops-and-runs a package can make a big difference.

Say please and thank you as a matter of habit, to show people in service industries that you appreciate the work they do, that saves time and effort on your part.

Or to be able to social engineer your way into making them think you're in the good graces.

Being honestly nice is easier than faking it.

What did you read on the ride home?

I would assume he rented a PO Box near his work, so he can do the same trick in the opposite direction.

This really interesting.

Back in the day, people would use business reply mail to get a small amount of revenge on companies that wronged them.

1. Wrap a cinderblock in brown paper

2. Tape a business reply envelope to the top of the package

3. Drop off the package at a mailbox or post office

4. Recipient pays first-class postage

I don't know if it's true, but I heard of people mailing used truck tires and big boxes of rocks or bricks this way.

Probably wouldn't work today, since anti-terror regulations require identification for packages above given dimensions.

Indeed, this is an old hack - when I was a kid, I asked my Mom if most of the family was Democrat or Republican. She told me that my grandfather, who was once an Indiana state senator, used to get fundraising letters from Republicans and would fill the business reply envelopes with gravel from the driveway before mailing them back :)

A related hack (and/or fraud?) - every month, the company that manages the apartment I rent sends me a bill in the mail. They send it to me in an envelope with a stamp, but they always place the stamp a couple inches below the top-right corner. This way, the cancellation machine misses the stamp, leaving it unmarked, allowing me to pry it off and use it to mail my rent check back to them! They must have gotten tired of the "I couldn't find a stamp!" excuse for late rent payments. Though perhaps if they took the time to invest in a modern e-payment system it wouldn't be an issue in the first place...

It didn't work then either. You were just annoying the postal workers.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/566/can-i-mail-a-br...

Looks like this trick still works in the UK, as people are sending bricks and other flotsam to the UKIP's freepost address.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/people-are-wasting-ukips...

And in Utah, 80,000 bricks were sent through the mail to build a bank.

http://www.stampsofdistinction.com/2008/07/bank-that-was-sen...

But it'll still work if I stuff the envelope full of crap, right? Along with, of course, a politely worded request to take me off their list.

If your intent is just to stop getting junk mail, this will do it: https://www.dmachoice.org/register.php

Doesn't work when you have persistent companies who won't take the hint and stop mailing you even after being on that list and even after calling them and even after replying to the twelfth or so missive saying you're not interested.

I had to take this tack with Good Sam (an RV "services" company, insurance and maintenance and such) who wouldn't get lost. Once after about 3 or 4 instances of being told to GTFO, they sent me this large manilla-envelope thing with a similarly sized reply envelope.

I shredded everything but the reply envelope into confetti, emptied my shredder (few days worth of stuff) into the envelope, threw a few pennies in there to increase the weight, and wrote on a sheet of paper "TAKE ME OFF YOUR LIST".

Haven't received anything since then. Perhaps coincidental, perhaps not, but so very satisfying.

A realtor I knew used this to send loan documents to the bank. She would just use clear tape and tape the envelope on top of the big fat manilla envelope of papers and drop it in the mail. Clearly the postage was different but the post office seemed to process it fine.

Actually, the post office may have noticed, but they probably don't care, since I'm not really cheating them out of revenue; they just charge Fidelity as if the envelope were legitimate.

Only Fidelity might complain, but they created these postage-free envelopes so customers like me would send them deposits, so they probably don't care, either.

It was a just a fun thing to try, and great to see that it worked!

If anything, it's saving Fidelity the expense of buying, printing, and distributing envelopes.

I've wondered for a long time if one could "hack" (or more like "exploit" or "cheat") the "Return To Sender" feature of the USPS to get free postage. Suppose I want to send a letter to John Doe without paying postage. I address the envelope to my own address and use John's address as the from address. I don't put a stamp on it. Without postage, the USPS should not deliver it to me and should return it to the sender for proper postage. BAM! John gets my letter.

I believe that's referred to as "mail fraud".

LOL... you are probably right.

This would only work if you were in the same delivery zone as John Doe. For instance, if you sent a letter "from" NYC while in the Bay Area, I'd suspect that they'd simply discard the mail.

If one sends a letter while traveling, they certainly expect to be able to put their home return address on it and have it function properly.

I suspect like most non-Internet things, it's just not worth being dishonest. And if you implemented it to the point where it became lucrative, they would get wise and come after you.

I have a FasTrak transponder (a box that goes in my car and lets me pay bridge tolls automatically). Last year it died and I called up the agency to get it replaced. CS told me when I received the replacement, to put the old one back in the envelope, mark it "return to sender" and put it back in the mail. I'm surprised USPS hasn't called them on it.

You and every grade schooler have come up with this "hack".

Posting cheques! How quaint. Do your financial institutions not support electronic money transfers?

A lot of businesses in America transfer funds electronically with a "pull" type of system. You give the business the bank account number of your account and they withdraw the funds. If the business does not offer this, then you need to send them the number on a piece of paper, such as a cheque.

This differs from European systems where businesses post incoming bank account numbers and customers "push" it from their banks to the business via a transfer form (which, if I recall correctly, you need to fill and deliver to the bank or post online, correct?)

Pull systems are THE WORST because you're putting 100% trust in the party you've given your account number to. I have multiple friends who have had various parties withdraw payments for loans in excess of what they were supposed to withdraw which put them in a serious financial predicament.

One in particular set all his bills up on auto-pay such that he didn't have to pay terribly close attention. His government-backed student loan payment took out something like 5x what it was supposed to and as a result he missed two months worth of payments (again because he didn't check regularly) and got quite a few other companies rather pissed off. And he had no recourse with the student loan folks.

After hearing about that kind of bullshit (I too am mostly setup for auto-pay) I got a second account with a totally separate bank which I occasionally deposit a few grand in for the companies that won't accept credit card payment for their services. This way even if one of them goes rogue and siphons the account dry they can't take me for more much more than is in the account. It doesn't protect me against someone going after my other accounts using judicial means, but it does provide a substantially higher barrier and gives me some peace of mind.

There are some other downsides to auto-debit, even when it's working 100%. Case in point: a woman was found dead in her home after six years. Her auto-debit kept the mortgage and all utilities paid...until the money ran out.

http://wnep.com/2014/03/07/auto-pay-bills-hide-womans-death-...

SEPA mandates are a pull system as well - at least in the Netherlands these are used for (monthly) subscriptions or down payments.

In the UK, if you have the sort code and account number you can push up to 100k GBP to that account in under 2mins via phone/web/mobile app banking.

The UK banking system is much smaller and has much better integration for interbank electronic transfers.

There's a great podcast about this issue here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/10/04/229224964/episode-...

They support electronic transfers but there are plenty of people who aren't good with technology/don't trust it/for some other reason can't do EMTs so there's this system as a backup and convenience.

Does it work if you send it to your own address?

No, of course not.

The permit number corresponds to a specific address.

I wonder if this guy is from the bay area. Because there's a Muji in SF and downtown San Jose.

Not particularly unethical as described, but I'd imagine this is technically a federal crime.

Link is dead.

404...

This brings up an embarrassment I have, being an american that's moved to Europe. I've had colleagues that have worked short-term in the u.s. and when they receive a 'check' from their workplace they think it's the most fascinating, interesting thing. A check! It's almost like they're holding the money in their hands... (their words, not mine)

I don't think my bank even has checks - at least they're not a standard enough feature that they mention them.

Thinking about it though, they did let me deposit a check from the u.s. once. It took about three works for it to go through. Wire transfers to anywhere in the world (I regularly send money to the u.s. and India) go through in two or three days.

In fact, the check I deposited was about $50K, so it's understandable it took awhile, but a wire transfer I received from the u.s. for the same exact amount only took two days.

So, why use checks?

We have a system where every bill is payable by bank transfer, and the bill you receive only contains the bank transfer information.

We're phasing out checks in the US as well. I have probably written 5 checks in my life.

I think the advantage is similar to cash, which is that you don't need to know anything about someone (except their name) to write and give them a check in person.

OTOH, that kind of delay on check cashing is only for very large amounts like you mentioned. I receive reimbursement checks from work because I never told them my bank account number for direct deposit, and I can take a picture of the check with my phone and have the whole quantity deposited in my account available for use immediately. Of course you also have to consider the time it takes for me to receive the physical check, so it's still much slower than a direct deposit.

I had a similar experience when I moved out to Australia (from the Netherlands). At one place I worked for a while I was paid with a check! Can you believe it. They'd give me an envelope that opened on the side and it had a piece of paper in it that "I" had to bring to the bank. I think my head almost exploded. Mostly because I wasn't expecting it and a little because of the retarded way of paying people. This was in 2007 and I was working for a digital ad agency, not on a construction side or something. Fascinating. I think my mother was the last person in the Netherlands to use a check. It must have been 1976 or something. :)

I think the main charm of checks are a certain untraceability. E.g. I was once in the states and received a check. As I was not a customer of any bank there, there was no easy way for me to cash it in. Solution: go to a friend's bank with him in tow so that he'd essentially cash it in but giving me all the money.

This could easily get your friend in tax trouble. If you need to cash a check and you don't have a bank account you typically go to the bank that issued the check and cash it there.

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