Mail Fraud

Mail fraud is the offense of using the postal system to carry out a scheme to defraud another person of money or property, one of the oldest recognized forms of fraud offense in common-law systems because it predates the electronic communications wire fraud was later defined to reach, and the two offenses share the same underlying deception requirement while differing only in the specific means used to further the scheme. As with wire fraud, mail fraud is defined by the act of using the mail in furtherance of a fraudulent scheme rather than by any particular type of scheme itself, so a single fraudulent enterprise can generate a separate charge for each mailing made to advance it, whether the mailing itself contains a fraudulent representation or is simply an ordinary piece of correspondence, such as an invoice or a check, sent in furtherance of the scheme. The offense remains a significant prosecutorial tool because almost any fraud scheme that involves sending or receiving anything through the postal system, from a fraudulent solicitation letter to a mailed payment, can support a mail fraud charge, even where the mailing itself was innocuous. Mail fraud is frequently charged together with wire fraud where a scheme has used both postal and electronic communications to reach its victims.