A new postage stamp rolled out Thursday honors the Amber Alert program used to broadcast missing-child reports. U.S. Postal Inspector Dave Margritz explains his federal law-enforcement agency gets involved any time crimes involve the mail, and he says since 1984 the service has arrested more than 4-thousand people for child porn and exploitation involving the mail and the Internet.
Margritz says his law-enforcement agency’s a federal one like the secret service and FBI, with jurisdiction over any crime involving the mail. They have full arrest authority and investigate cases and present them for prosecution. More people may be sending e-mail on computers than written letters these days, but Margritz says that hasn’t cut down on cases for his agency to handle.
There’s as much as ever, he says, because he says “a lot of hybrid cases” that start out as spam or an e-mail communication eventually involve sending payment or false documents through the mail.