This story is pretty amazing, featuring equal parts of both stupidity and chutzpah:
The timeworn apartment building in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood hardly looks like the corporate headquarters of one of the world’s largest shipping companies.
But for a few recent months, that’s essentially what it became — at least as far as the U.S. Postal Service was concerned.
Federal court papers unsealed last week revealed an astonishing but ultimately bungled scheme to file a change-of-address form claiming that shipping giant United Parcel Service had moved its headquarters from a bustling business park in Atlanta to a tiny garden apartment.
Not only did the change go through, but it also took months for anyone to catch on. In the meantime, so many thousands of pieces of first-class mail meant for UPS poured into Apartment L2 at 6750 N. Ashland Ave. that a mail carrier had to bring in a tub to hold it all, a search warrant application filed in U.S. District Court disclosed.
Among the correspondence were letters meant for the company’s CEO and other executives, sensitive documents containing personal information, as well as corporate credit cards and tens of thousands of dollars in business checks, according to an affidavit from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service submitted with the warrant.
It wasn’t until the resident, Dushaun Spruce, allegedly deposited nearly $60,000 in UPS checks into his bank account in late January that UPS was alerted to the alleged scam, court papers say.
In a brief interview last week with a Chicago Tribune reporter, Spruce acknowledged that authorities had served a warrant on him in January and seized mail, checkbooks, bank records and other documents from his apartment.
“They took things they weren’t supposed to,” said Spruce, 24, standing barefoot at the building’s main entrance.
While not disclosing Spruce’s name, the unsealed warrant contained other clues to his identity: both his current apartment number at the Ashland address as well as his previous address in the 1900 block of West Fargo Avenue. Public records listed both addresses for him.
Spruce has not been criminally charged and denies any wrongdoing. The investigation by postal inspectors and federal prosecutors continues, law enforcement sources said.
A spokesman for UPS confirmed that the company was recently notified that mail intended for UPS employees had been “redirected by an unauthorized change of address by a third party.” He declined further comment.
Snip.
It wasn’t until Jan. 16 — nearly three months after the address changes — that a UPS security coordinator caught on to the alleged scheme and notified postal inspectors, the court records show.
The security coordinator notified investigators that not only had UPS not authorized the change but it also appeared that about 150 corporate American Express cards in various employee names — including the CEO and members of the board of directors — had been issued under the Ashland Avenue address, the affidavit said.
It was later learned that only five cards had actually been shipped, and none had been misused, according to the affidavit.
The day after the alleged fraud was detected, postal inspectors interviewed the carrier who delivers the mail to Spruce’s building. The carrier said “voluminous” amounts of UPS mail had been coming to the apartment for months, far more than would fit in the small boxes assigned to tenants, the affidavit said.
To accommodate the deluge, the carrier “had to place the mail in a USPS tub and leave it at (Spruce’s) door,” the affidavit said.
The carrier, who at times also handed mail directly to Spruce, identified him from a photograph shown by the agents, according to the affidavit.
A week later, postal inspectors returned to the building and began retrieving “several thousand” pieces of first-class and registered mail addressed to UPS at Spruce’s apartment, the affidavit said. Agents found that some of the mail “contained personal identifying information of UPS employees as well as business checks mailed to UPS and accounts payable invoices,” according to the affidavit.
That same day, investigators at Fifth Third Bank notified postal inspectors that more than 10 checks addressed to UPS were deposited to a personal account belonging to Spruce. The checks totaled more than $58,000, according to the affidavit.
Agents reviewed bank surveillance footage and matched the person making the deposits to Spruce’s driver’s license photo, according to the affidavit.
The search warrant served on Jan. 26 contained a list of items to be seized from Spruce, including “all mail, parcels and packages” and any credit cards, checks, invoices or financial records “of any kind” that were linked to UPS.
Agents also planned to seize “all items associated with identity theft, including personal identifying information (and) devices used to manufacture credit cards,” according to the warrant.
Spruce has no felony convictions in his background. But a year before his alleged UPS scam began, he was arrested twice in a matter of days by Evanston police on minor drug charges and allegations of bank fraud, records show.
On Nov. 20, 2016, Evanston police pulled over Spruce’s Hyundai and found an open container of alcohol as well as at least 30 grams of marijuana, according to Cook County court records. He was charged with misdemeanor drug possession and driving on a suspended license — a case that prosecutors agreed to drop in exchange for 40 hours of community service.
It’s obvious that Mr. Spruce is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but you can’t say he lacks ambition. Protip: If you’re going to commit interstate mail fraud, do not use your home address. You use a third party mail address, address for a dummy company (I would have gone with “United Package Systems”), which is in turn registered to a another dummy company in the Cayman Islands. You deposit the UPS checks in the “United Package Systems” account, then transfer the money to a Cayman Islands account, and then to your secret Swiss bank account, and you shut everything down and skip town at the first sign anyone’s caught on.
Geeze, do I have to tell you people everything?
Mr. Spruce does not seem to have put this much (or indeed any) forethought into his little caper, and he’s very lucky that he’s not headed to a federal prison even as we speak. I’m guessing that both UPS and USPS are trying to figure out how such a stupid fraud worked for any length of time at all. Did UPS just not receive any mail for a few months and not notice?
And did not Mr. Spruce’s local mail carrier express suspicions the first time they deposited a tub full of mail addressed to UPS to his apartment?
