Joyce Szczocczarz says it's just not fair.
“They always want more than what they have,” she says. “Nobody's ever happy. Be happy with what you got!”
She put mail in her mailbox on Monday the 26, including a few bills and a birthday card with a check for her daughter.
She didn't realize that there was no mail pickup that day, until her husband came home and noticed something fishy.
“Every single mailbox is open,” she recalls her husband telling her. “You didn't have anything in there did you? I said ‘Yeah I did'. He said 'Why?' Well, I didn't realize there wasn't mail yesterday."
Turns out Joyce was a victim of mail theft and she wasn't the only one in the Jensen Park Estates Community.
“In the last couple of days we've had 13 mailboxes that were clearly tampered with,” Martin County Sheriff William Snyder says. “Somebody went to the mail moved it around looking for items of value.”
The worry is those thieves will use those valuable pieces of mail to get credit card or bank information.
The sheriff is warning residents to be careful of what the put in or receive in their mailbox.
His second warning, this one directly to the Post-Christmas Grinch, time is ticking on your spree.
“They persist in hitting us in Martin County, and I will give them my personal assurance that we will ultimately catch them,” Sheriff Snyder says.
As for Joyce, dealing with the aftermath has been a pain.
“You had to go to the bank and close accounts and open new accounts and go to social security,” she says.
Joyce says she won't make the same mistake again, but is frustrated that it has even come to that point.
“What are you gonna do? You just wonder what makes people bad?"
The sheriff’s office encourages anyone else who believes they were a victim of a mail thief to contact their office.
