Police arrested three men accused of selling thousands of pills of meth-laced “Adderall” on various darknet marketplaces and mailing them through the United States Postal Service through a fictitious business called “Professional Paper Filing Inc.” that listed a real return address of an uninvolved business. That business then told police that it was repeatedly getting packages of pills in the mail as “return to sender.”
The men face a maximum possible penalty of life imprisonment.
Surely the USPS would then just open the package, to try and identify who the sender was instead?
I don’t believe USPS can open packages without a warrant (which is why they’re the preferred courier for drugs), and I don’t think “multiple packages going to a wrong address” counts as probable cause. But it’s been a minute since I’ve been involved in that end of things, so I dunno if that’s still current protocol.
https://www.uspis.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/USPIS-FAQs.pdf
Per #4 they need a warrant to open first class mail only. All other mail they can open without a warrant.
If it’s first class and they think the contents violate federal law then they can get a warrant. I doubt many legitimate pharmacies etc. ship pills via first class, and certainly not with a bogus return address. If they saw a pattern of that I would expect a warrant wouldn’t be too difficult to get.