A postman in Washington, D.C., rang more than twice. He pushed the doorbell three, four, and many times more to accumulate almost $2 million by stealing checks in the mail he delivered, federal prosecutors allege. Or checks in the mail he didn’t deliver.
And he would have gotten away with it if federal gumshoes hadn’t arrested him before he hopped a flight back home.
Home for Hachikosela Muchimba is Zambia, which raises an obvious but rhetorical observation that the U.S. Postal Service hired a Zambian immigrant, and likely many other immigrants, to deliver the mail as the China Virus panic began and the unemployment rate soared.
The Scheme
Answer aside, Muchimba, hired in February 2020, stole checks from October 21 until March 2023 when he was caught, the Justice Department alleges. He is charged with mail theft and bank fraud and faces decades in prison.
The trouble for Muchimba began when a customer on his route reported that a U.S. Treasury check was stolen and “fraudulently negotiated,” meaning deposited. “At around the same time, law enforcement identified five U.S. Treasury checks that had been fraudulently negotiated into an account at TD Bank,” the criminal complaint alleges:
On January 3, 2023, a postal customer (“W-1”) provided me with a copy of a U.S. Treasury check in the amount of $14,304.82 that was written pay to the order of “Hachikosela Khose Muchimba, **** Hayes Street NE, *******, Washington, DC 20019-1804.” This check was supposed to be addressed to W-1 (and payable to W-1) but W-1 had never received the check. This check was endorsed on the back pay to the order of “Double Blue Investments” and deposited via mobile application on September 7, 2022.
Amusingly, Muchimba, who depicts himself as an investor and gemologist on LinkedIn, sealed his own fate by being a nice mailman. His victim recognized the Zambian’s name from the “holiday” cards he gave to customers.
The bank provided the agents with other checks Muchimba deposited, and video surveillance showed him depositing a check for $53,691.82 on August 18, 2022.
But that was a pittance compared to what Muchimba stole, prosecutors allege — almost 100 checks worth nearly $ 2 million:
During this investigation, law enforcement has reviewed financial records for additional bank accounts that MUCHIMBA controlled at seven financial institutions: Sandy Spring Bank, TD Bank, Capital One, Bank of America, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Digital Credit Union, Ally Bank, Sutton Bank, and First National Bank. For the time period October 2021 through March 2023, MUCHIMBA deposited approximately 98 misappropriated checks into those seven bank accounts with an aggregate value of $1,697,909.52. At least 90 of those misappropriated checks were U.S. Treasury checks that were not addressed to MUCHIMBA; the remaining checks were issued by private parties to persons other than MUCHIMBA.
Leaving on a Jet Plane
Despite that evidence, the federal prosecutors’ detention memorandum explains, Muchimba rejected a pre-indictment plea offer.
After the Washington Post reported on civil filings in the case, he tried to jet out of the country.
“On September 19, 2023, law enforcement learned that the defendant had booked travel on an outbound flight to Zambia scheduled to leave from Dulles International Airport at 10:30 AM on September 20,” the memorandum says.
The feds bagged him that morning as he was about to board the flight back home with $2,000 in his luggage. He “was also carrying a passport newly-issued by Zambia on July 19, 2023.”
Muchimba had finally figured out he better get out of town before the feds lowered the boom.
Immigrant Postal Workers
As for immigrants working for USPS, the Immigration Impact website claims they are “essential.”
Citing 2018 data from Virginia’s George Mason University, the website reported in 2020 — again, as the China Virus “pandemic” swept the nation and shut down the country — that 12 percent of postal workers are foreigners, and 85 percent of them are naturalized citizens:
The breakdown of foreign-born USPS workers is:
- 15% of postal services sorters, processors, and machine operators are immigrants.
- 5% of postal service clerks are immigrants.
- 7% of mail carriers are immigrants.
It’s estimated that as many as half of all ballots during the 2020 presidential election will be cast by mail.
The occasion for the observation was that postal workers would deliver millions of mail-in ballots because the China Virus would make voting in person a great difficulty.
“As the situation stands in September 2020, the U.S. Postal Service is expected to become a bastion of democracy in extraordinary times,” an immigration law firm claimed in October 2020, because “forcing people to stand in line at polling stations, even with the basic measures of social distancing and wearing masks, won’t be enough to prevent contagion. Voting by mail may not be what Americans would normally prefer, but this is the most sensible option at this time.”
So immigrants — likely hostile to President Donald Trump — helped control delivery of mail-in ballots.
Unhappily, we’ll never know how many fraudulent ballots those immigrants delivered, or how many real ballots for former president Trump they didn’t.
Given the news about Muchimba, perhaps staffing the Post Office with Third World thieves isn’t such a bright idea.
Forgetting the theft or thefts, the unemployment rate when USPS hired Muchimba soared from 3.5 percent in February to 14.7 percent in April, and was still 6.9 percent that October.
Millions of Americans went unemployed while immigrants worked at post offices.
