Theft is so prosecuted at the USPS.
Any letters that appear to have been purposely opened were opened by the machining of mail.
I work on those machines and the mail goes through them at 27mph and anything that is not flat can cause the mail piece to be torn open, and it appears like a razor opened them.
I won’t say no they happens, but the machines tear mail.
I worked the OCR’s and BCS machines too. When those get jammed, they crunch the mail like an accordion before they’ll rip to shreds. And they get oil marks all over them.
What I am encountering now is - very neatly sliced at the top seam cards. They’ve been sliced with a razor, not jammed by the machine.
And it’s pretty much guaranteed every holiday.
When I call the PO, the standard answer isn’t -“we’ll look into this..” ; rather, it’s “I can’t say that it happened at OUR office..”
Man, if I so much as stepped on a lawn and someone called to complain - back in the day, it was like the Nuremberg trials.