On September 8, 2025, Rashad Deon Stolden — a 34-year-old U.S. Postal Service letter carrier assigned to the Bicentennial Post Office in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles, California — was sentenced to 66 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $1,627,291 in restitution after pleading guilty on April 14, 2025, to one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud. Between 2020 and August 2024, Stolden used his daily access to the residential mail stream to pull large-value Treasury checks and California Employment Development Department debit cards from outgoing mail, selling the stolen checks to co-conspirators who used counterfeit identity documents to negotiate them and purchasing victims' personal identifying information to activate stolen EDD cards. The scheme yielded more than $10 million across four years, including a single $7.3 million Treasury check lifted in June 2022 that a co-conspirator deposited at a Tennessee bank and converted into more than $1 million in withdrawals. The case was investigated by the USPS Office of Inspector General, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the Treasury Department, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the Coast Guard Investigative Service, and prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Brown of the Major Frauds Section before U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner. Among his victims were disabled and unemployed Californians whose EDD benefit cards he stripped clean while his own messages showed him debating whether to book a $13,000 hotel stay in Bora Bora or upgrade to a $20,000 presidential villa at the Conrad.

Disclaimer: This video is a dramatization based on real events. Some visual content was created with artificial intelligence assistance. Some details have been fictionalized and all names have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.