When Lucie Volotzky, a 26-year resident and business owner in Chatsworth, woke up on Aug. 1, the last thing she expected to see was the mail she had placed in her local postal collection box the day before floating down her street in the gutter.

Volotzky said that, upon seeing her mail sailing by, she second-guessed herself, wondering how she could have missed putting her checks and other important mail into the slot of the mailbox. 

"But then I saw another letter, and I thought, 'That looks like my daughter's handwriting.' It was something she'd written to her boyfriend," Volotzky said.

She then realized that she and the rest of her neighborhood had become victims of a thief rifling through their mail.

Mail theft is a common crime: The United States Postal Inspection Service arrests the opportunistic thieves by the thousands every year, according to its website. The site states that the service made more than 6,000 arrests in connection with mail theft last year.

Recently, neighborhoods around Los Angeles have been hit with mail-theft schemes on a large scale. The Los Angeles Daily News reported last year that some members in a ring of eight thieves who each stole hundreds of pieces of mail in 2008 received four-year sentences for their crimes.

As much effort as the inspection service puts into catching mail thieves, Volotzky said she is still disappointed with the way her case has been handled. She said she isn't as angry over the theft itself as over what she saw as a lack of help from the post office.

"The problem is, we've already paid for this mail through stamps," she said. "These aren't taxes, they're money in the form of stamps, and when you're paying someone to send something for you, they should have the responsibility to do the right job."

After discovering her and her neighbors' mail in the gutter, Volotzky took the pile of soaking letters to the Chatsworth post office. When she arrived she was surprised to find that the post office worker she dealt with that day didn't appear to know what to do with the mail.

The United States Postal Service website states that its inspection service is the primary handler of such cases; local post offices aren't equipped to respond to thefts in their areas.

A member of the Chatsworth Neighborhood Council, Volotzky brought her concerns to the council in a meeting earlier this month. She also advised avoiding leaving mail in collection boxes over the weekend.

According to the USPS website, handing mail directly to postal carriers, asking neighbors to pick up mail over vacations and starting Neighborhood Watch programs are other ways to avoid becoming a victim of mail theft.

The USPS inspection service advises victims of mail theft to report criminal behavior directly to its office or to their local postmasters. The inspection service office can be reached by telephone at 877-876-2455.