MARIETTA, Ga. — An Atlanta-area woman shared her strange predicament with 11Alive: She kept getting sent Georgia Lottery scratch-off tickets by mistake.
Despite her best efforts to alert lottery officials and get the situation resolved, they kept coming. Seven packages in all this month, containing thousands of dollars’ worth of lottery scratchers.
The temptation here is obvious: Scratch the tickets, get rich.
It’s not your fault, after all, that they keep coming. And you did your best to get it fixed.
But, of course, things don’t work quite like that.
Obstructing the mail is illegal
The reason Veronica Taylor of Marietta couldn’t just scratch the tickets herself – or sell them to somebody else, or even throw them out and be done with it entirely – is that federal mail law is no joke.
(A lottery representative also told 11Alive the tickets aren’t active and redeemable when they’re delivered, but that’s more of a technical matter.)
The most commonly cited statute on the matter is section 1702 of the U.S. criminal code, which states:
“Whoever takes any letter, postal card, or package out of any post office or any authorized depository for mail matter, or from any letter or mail carrier, or which has been in any post office or authorized depository, or in the custody of any letter or mail carrier, before it has been delivered to the person to whom it was directed, with design to obstruct the correspondence, or to pry into the business or secrets of another, or opens, secretes, embezzles, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.”
In plain English, it means if you interfere with somebody receiving their mail, you can go to jail for five years.
Generally speaking, if you accidentally open someone else’s mail, it’s not illegal.
But, say, you simply got sick of lottery tickets showing up to your door and decided to start scratching them? Very illegal. Or just threw them out in frustration? Also very illegal.
Photos: Lottery tickets delivered to woman's Marietta home
Now, it almost never happens that someone is prosecuted in common individual cases. Anyone who’s ever lived in an apartment and just kept tossing away the previous tenant’s mail probably never had to deal with police knocking on the door asking about it.
Still, to follow the law, you’re supposed to make the effort to pass the mail along to its rightful destination. Usually it’s not any more difficult than marking it “return to sender” and slipping it back in the outgoing box.
According to the USPS domestic mail manual, you may also “mark a mailpiece ‘Refused’ and return it within a reasonable time, if the piece or any attachment is not opened.”
If it keeps happening, as in the unfortunate case of Taylor, there’s no easy fix.
"I don't know what I'm supposed to do with any of it. I don't want it. I don't need it,” she told 11Alive. “I don't even play the Georgia lottery anymore.”
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