One evening as my family was about to sit down for dinner the phone rang. I picked it up and was greeted by a detective from the Campbell Police Department. Because I had been working on an upcoming mail theft story I knew the guy and assumed he was calling me to answer some follow-up questions. It didn't occur to me to notice he was calling my house instead of my office.

Then he started asking me questions about writing a check to a person I'd never heard of for an amount I definitely would have remembered. That's when he said, "Well, we arrested these suspects for another crime, and when we opened the trunk of the car we discovered check laundering equipment, computer software and a number of 'washed' checks. Yours was one of them."

I was too shocked to answer, but I must have said something because he asked me to get my checkbook and verify the check number and amount. I found myself fumbling through my purse to locate the information.

It turns out that I had written a check in the amount of $17.50 to reimburse a parent at my children's school and left the envelope hanging out of my mailbox for the mail carrier to pick up. Some stranger stole the letter instead, and my check was altered from $17.50 to $1,750.

But on the day of the detective's phone call luck was my friend and the police caught the person before she cashed my check. I was also lucky the thief hadn't stolen my mail a week earlier. That's when all my paid bills had been put out to be picked up.

I remember asking, "You mean this person just walked up to my mailbox and took it? How can that be?"

And the detective said, "Moryt, it happens all the time."

So the story I was writing suddenly took on a personal significance, and I knew firsthand the dangers of innocently leaving your paid bills dangling from the mailbox. It's also when I learned the hard facts from fraud investigators and postal inspectors.

Identity theft—which often occurs through mail theft—is one of the fastest growing crimes, with more than a half-million people affected last year. And I had become part of that statistic.

The authorities are emphatic about never putting paid bills in your mailbox. They insist that the only safe thing to do is to take the bill to the post office, put it in your office mail, or drop it in a public mailbox, making sure it's close to the pickup hour. And they suggest getting a home shedder because junk mail can be dangerous as well.

We actually had a shedder in the house because my husband didn't want to put credit card purchase receipts in our recycling bin. I, on the other hand, was rather cavalier about the whole thing and paid no attention to what I was tossing into the recycling bin.

But the police told me, "You know all those promotional checks you get from credit card companies? Anyone could pretend they're you and use them. It has all the necessary information they need."

So now I have gone from cavalier to paranoid and shred everything. Well, maybe paranoid is too strong a word, but having been touched by this crime brought me down from the clouds real fast.

I check all the junk mail to make sure that our name or some special customer code is nowhere to be found. If it is, it's shredded. I take all my mail to the post office and take my delivered mail out of the box as promptly as possible. One of the things I was told was that some thieves watch homes to make sure the resident's gone off to work so they can go through the mail.

So was it a coincidence that I was researching a mail theft story when it happened to me? Maybe. Maybe not. But it certainly caught my attention.

Moryt Milo is the editor of The Campbell Reporter. She can be contacted at 408.200.1051 or mmilo@svcn.com.