How The U.S. Post Office Was Tricked Into Delivering All UPS Mail To Some Rando

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How The U.S. Post Office Was Tricked Into Delivering All UPS Mail To Some Rando

Dushaun Henderson-Spruce was a fraudster of grand ambition but not that much skill. One time, he tried depositing a check for $1 trillion into his bank account. His bank realized it was counterfeit, but they didn't press charges because the whole scheme was so ridiculous. He'd never stood a chance at succeeding, and really, by giving them a good laugh, he'd done them a favor. 

Clearly, Dushaun had to think smaller. He turned to his experience delivering packages for UPS, a job he'd had when he was 18. He knew UPS receives stuff from the post office—not the stuff it delivers, but stuff addressed to executives and employees. He also knew that if you file a change-of-address form at the post office, they'll divert mail from one address to another. So, what would happen if he filed a form stating that UPS had changed its address, moving from its headquarters in Atlanta to his own small Chicago apartment a few blocks from Wrigley Field?

You'd think this would fail just as surely as the check scheme had. But it did not. He filed the form successfully in October 2017, without the post office demanding any proof that he was authorized to act on UPS's behalf. In the part of the page where he had to leave his initials, he wrote "HS"—then crossed that out and wrote "UPS" instead. 

Soon, the post office was sending thousands of pieces of mail to his home. Obviously, this was an absurd amount of mail for some random Chicago twentysomething to receive, and the mail carrier realized something had to be done about this. So this postal employee responded by ... providing Dushaun with an oversize mail bin, since the apartment's own mailbox was nowhere large enough to hold everything. 

Dushaun didn't have much use for love letters and bank statements, but he did manage to retrieve a bunch of checks from the incoming mail. He deposited close to $60,000, and though none of these were in his name, the deposits went through at first. In time, however, checks again proved to be his downfall, and authorities caught on and nabbed him. 

In the end, they sentenced him to little more than time served, since he actually hadn't spent much of the money. And the post office of course now revised how it handles changing addresses. Probably revised how it handles changing addresses. There's only one way to be sure ... 

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For more criminal schemes, see also:

The 9 Most Hilarious Ways Criminals Were Caught

The 6 Most Hilariously Stupid Criminal Excuses of All Time

8 Criminals Who Took Dumbassery to Staggering Heights

Top image: FEMA

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