The big blue neighborhood mailbox is getting a high-tech make over. The U.S. Postal Service is clamping down on mail theft this holiday season and beyond. They are installing 12-thousand high-security collection boxes in high-risk areas around the country.
Postal officials say there have been more than 25-thousand incidents of mail theft in the first half of the current fiscal year and in a significant number of them, the blue box was an easy target.
The new boxes do not look any different on the outside than the old ones. Officials are tight-lipped on the security advancements but say the new versions are designed to thwart a number of different attacks.
About 10-thousand of them are already installed nationwide.