What to do if a package is lost or stolen

Read the tracking status before you read anything into it. USPS's own missing mail guidance opens with checking the current status for exactly this reason — a large share of parcels people report as lost are still in the network, sitting on a status like in transit, arriving late or moving through network, and they turn up. A package that has not been scanned as delivered has not been stolen; it has been delayed, and the remedy for a delay is different from the remedy for a theft.

If it says delivered, search physically before you search online. Carriers scan at the moment of handoff, and handoffs go wrong in mundane ways: the parcel is behind a gate, under porch furniture, tucked at a side door, in a mailroom, in a parcel locker whose code went to a spam folder, at the leasing office, or on the identical porch of the unit next door. Knock on both neighbors' doors the same day. Check the mailbox itself, because smaller parcels are often left there rather than at the door.

Then ask the carrier what the scan actually recorded. Delivery scans carry more detail than the public tracking page shows — a time, often a GPS location, and a disposition such as left at front door, handed to individual or delivered to an agent. Your local Post Office can sometimes put the question directly to the carrier who ran the route that day, and USA.gov lists 1-800-ASK-USPS (1-800-275-8777) as the general USPS customer service line for delivery problems.

Preserve evidence immediately, because most of it expires. Screenshot the tracking page with its timestamps rather than trusting that it will still say the same thing next week. Save the order confirmation and the shipment notification email. Pull doorbell or security camera footage for a window either side of the scan time and export it — consumer systems routinely overwrite recordings within days. Ask neighbors with cameras on the same day, not the following weekend.

Write down every contact as you make it: the date, the time, who you spoke to, what they said and any reference or case number. Every route that follows — the seller, the marketplace, the carrier claim, the card issuer, the police report — asks for the same core set of facts. Assembling them once, in one place, turns four separate ordeals into four copies of the same email.

Finally, note the clocks. They run in parallel and they start from different dates: the mailing date for a USPS claim, the statement date for a credit card billing error, the order date for most marketplace guarantees, and whatever window the seller's own policy sets. None of them pauses while you wait on hold, and the routes with the shortest windows are usually the ones with the strongest remedies.

The instinct is to chase the carrier, and it is almost always the wrong body. You bought goods from a seller; the seller bought transportation from a carrier. Those are two separate contracts and you are a party to only one of them. That structural fact is why carriers tell recipients that the shipper must file the claim, and why an hour spent arguing with a carrier's call center rarely produces anything you can take to the person who holds your money.

The seller, by contrast, is bound by a federal rule with teeth. Under 16 CFR 435.2 — the Mail, Internet, or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule the Federal Trade Commission enforces — a seller must have a reasonable basis to expect that it can ship within the time it stated, or, where it stated no time, within thirty days after receiving a properly completed order. Where the buyer has applied for credit to pay for the purchase, the default period is fifty days.

If the seller cannot meet that date, the rule does not let it go quiet. It must offer you, clearly and conspicuously and without prior demand, the option either to consent to a delay or to cancel and receive a prompt refund, and that offer has to include a definite revised shipping date or a statement that it cannot estimate one. You may cancel at any time before shipment. If the revised delay would run more than thirty days past the original deadline, the order is treated as canceled and the refund is owed unless you expressly agree to wait.

Be precise about what that rule does and does not reach. It governs shipping — whether the goods left on time and what happens when they did not. It does not decide who bears the loss when a parcel was genuinely delivered to your address and then stolen from the step. Once delivery has happened, responsibility turns on the seller's own policy, the marketplace guarantee you bought through, state contract law on when risk of loss passes, and the payment network's dispute rules.

That is why the answer to who is responsible for a stolen package is genuinely unsatisfying: nobody is automatically. What you have instead is a set of overlapping routes, several of which are discretionary and most of which sellers grant anyway. A large retailer will usually replace a parcel that vanished after a delivery scan, because the alternative is a chargeback it will probably lose on paperwork alone and a customer it will not see again.

So treat a delivered scan as evidence rather than as a verdict. It tells you a carrier believed it completed a delivery at a location. It does not tell you the location was yours, that the parcel was left somewhere reasonable, or that you received it. Sellers who reply with nothing more than tracking shows delivered have answered a question you did not ask, and saying so plainly, in writing, is usually the moment the conversation changes.

Open the seller's own channel rather than the phone: the order page, the help form attached to the transaction, or the marketplace message thread. Those routes attach your complaint to the order record automatically, and they produce a timestamped written trail that a phone call does not. If you must call, follow it with an email summarizing what was agreed, addressed to whoever you spoke to.

State the remedy you want in the first sentence. A replacement shipped to a different, secure address, or a full refund to the original payment method — not both, not vaguely, and not a complaint that describes the problem and leaves the seller to choose. Requests without a named remedy get an apology, a link to a tracking page and a closed ticket.

Include the facts that make the claim easy to grant: the order number, the tracking number, the exact delivery scan timestamp, a plain statement that the item was not received, the fact that you have searched the property and asked neighbors and the building office, whether camera footage exists, and a police report number if you have one. A seller deciding whether to absorb a loss is deciding how much friction the alternative involves, and a complete claim is a low-friction one.

Expect some sellers to ask for a signed statement or affidavit of non-receipt before they will refund or reship. That is a reasonable control against a real fraud problem, and refusing to sign is the fastest way to end a claim that was otherwise going to be paid. Read it, make sure it says only that you did not receive the goods, and return it the same day.

If you bought through a marketplace rather than direct, the marketplace's own buyer guarantee is usually the stronger route, and it is a separate one. These programs run on their own filing windows, typically require you to contact the seller first and wait a stated number of days before escalating, and close permanently once the window passes. Find the policy page for the platform you actually used, note both dates in your calendar the day you open the case, and escalate on the first day you are allowed to.

When a seller stalls, put a deadline in writing and say what happens next: I have not received the goods; please confirm a refund or a replacement by [date], after which I will raise a billing error with my card issuer. Keep it factual and unemotional. Do not let a seller and a carrier pass you between them for weeks — the sixty-day card dispute window is running the entire time, and it is the one route nobody can talk you out of.

USPS runs two entirely separate processes and people routinely file the wrong one. A Missing Mail search request is an attempt to find the item. An insurance claim is an attempt to be paid for it. They have different eligibility, different forms and different clocks, and filing one does not start the other.

The search request opens seven days after the mailing date and is submitted at missingmail.usps.com with a USPS.com account. It asks for the sender and recipient addresses, the type and size of the container or envelope, identifying information such as the tracking number or the mailing date from your mailing or Click-N-Ship receipt, a description of the contents and any supporting photographs. USPS confirms receipt by email, sends periodic updates, and forwards the item to the address you gave if it is found.

Describe the contents as if you were describing them to someone holding the item and trying to match it to a request — brand, model, color, size, distinguishing marks, and what the packaging looks like from the outside. Vague descriptions are the main reason a search produces nothing, because the search is fundamentally a matching exercise against items that have been separated from their labels.

A claim is only available where the mailpiece carried insurance. USPS lists Priority Mail Express items and other insured mail, Collect on Delivery items and insured Registered Mail as claimable. Several retail services now include a base level of insurance in the price, which is why the answer to whether a parcel was insured is often yes even though nobody bought insurance separately — check the service used on the shipping label rather than assuming.

The filing windows differ by service, and both ends matter: file too early and the claim is rejected as premature, file too late and it is rejected as time-barred. Damage and missing-contents claims are the tightest of all, because the sixty-day limit runs from the mailing date rather than from the day you opened the box.

You will need the tracking or label number, the original mailing receipt issued at the time of mailing, and proof of value — a sales receipt, invoice, credit card statement or a printout of the online transaction. The mailing receipt is the sticking point for recipients, because it is in the sender's hands. If you are the buyer, ask the seller for it in the same message in which you report the loss, and expect that in many cases the seller will simply file the claim itself.

USPS says it usually issues claim decisions within five to ten days. A denied or partly paid claim can be appealed within thirty days of the decision, and a second appeal is available within a further thirty days. Separately from insurance, services carrying a money-back guarantee — Priority Mail Express is the obvious one — support a postage refund request when the guaranteed delivery commitment was missed, which is a different claim with a different form.

Private carriers are not covered by the USPS claim rules above. They move goods under their own tariffs and service guides, publish their own filing deadlines and their own default liability limits, and administer claims as a matter of contract rather than under a consumer regulation. The practical consequence is that there is no federal claim window to point at — you have to read the claims page of the carrier that actually held the parcel, and read the current version of it.

The bigger structural point is who may file. The right to claim generally follows the contract of carriage, which belongs to the party that bought the label. For an online purchase that is the seller, which is why carriers so often decline to open a claim for a recipient. Some carriers will accept a recipient-initiated report and use it to start a trace, but the settlement is paid to the shipper. If you want a carrier claim filed, the efficient move is to ask the seller to file it and to ask for the case number so you can quote it later.

Declared value is not insurance, and the distinction matters when a seller tells you it cannot recover more than a nominal amount. Carriers apply a default limit of liability to every shipment and charge extra to raise it. That choice was the seller's when it bought the label, and your claim against the seller is unaffected by what the carrier will pay it.

Last-mile couriers, including retailers' own delivery arms and gig-driver networks, usually attach a photograph to the delivery scan. Look at it closely and compare it to your own front door: the doormat, the paint color, the house number, the plants, the light at that time of day. Photographs of somebody else's porch are the cleanest evidence there is that a delivery went to the wrong address, and they convert a discretionary refund request into an obvious one.

If the parcel was left somewhere unreasonable or contrary to instructions you had given — at a street-facing door on a busy road, in the rain, in full view when you had asked for it to be left with a neighbor — say so explicitly and in writing. That is a delivery failure argument rather than a theft argument, and it puts the loss back on the party that chose where to leave the item.

Do not organize your week around the carrier investigation. It runs on the carrier's timetable, it reports to the shipper rather than to you, and its outcome rarely changes what the seller is willing to do. Open it if it is easy, then get on with the seller claim and the card dispute, both of which have deadlines the investigation will not respect.

Stealing mail is a federal crime, not a nuisance. Under 18 U.S.C. 1708, it is an offense to steal, take, abstract or by fraud or deception obtain mail from an authorized depository, a mail receptacle or a carrier; to remove any article from a letter, package or bag of mail; or to buy, receive, conceal or possess stolen mail knowing it to be stolen. The penalty is a fine, imprisonment for up to five years, or both, and the offense does not depend on the value of what was taken.

The agency that enforces it is the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. Reports go through uspis.gov/report or the hotline on 1-877-876-2455, and written reports can be mailed to the Criminal Investigations Service Center, Attn: Mail Fraud, 433 W. Harrison Street, Room 3255, Chicago, IL 60699-3255. USPIS states that inspectors arrest thousands of mail and package thieves each year, and that nearly 9,300 suspects were arrested for mail theft and related crimes between 2019 and 2024.

Report the theft to local police as well, through the non-emergency line rather than 911 — USPIS reserves 911 for an active crime in progress, which a theft you discovered hours later is not. Many departments now take these reports online. The point is not usually detection; it is the report number, which marketplaces, sellers and insurers ask for and which converts your account of events into a record somebody else created.

Route the complaint to the right postal body, because there are three and they do different things. Theft or fraud by someone outside the Postal Service goes to the Postal Inspection Service. Theft, fraud or waste by a postal employee goes to the USPS Office of Inspector General, which USA.gov lists on 1-888-USPS-OIG (1-888-877-7644). Ordinary delivery service complaints — a carrier who leaves parcels in the rain, a route with a chronic problem — go to USPS customer service on 1-800-ASK-USPS, and then, if unresolved, to the USPS Consumer Advocate at 475 L'Enfant Plaza SW, Washington, DC 20260.

Keep reporting even when a single parcel is unlikely to be investigated on its own. Postal Inspectors build cases from patterns — a cluster of thefts from the same block of mailboxes, the same apartment complex, the same week — and the pattern is only visible if the individual thefts were reported. A neighborhood that reports nothing looks, in the data, like a neighborhood with no problem.

Check your own insurance before you write the loss off. Some renters and homeowners policies cover theft of personal property away from the dwelling, including from a porch, subject to the policy deductible and to how the insurer treats a claim on your record. It is worth reading the policy or asking the insurer a hypothetical question before filing, particularly for a modest loss.

If you paid by credit card, the strongest route does not depend on anyone's cooperation. Regulation Z, at 12 CFR 1026.13, defines a billing error to include a charge for goods or services not accepted by the consumer or the consumer's designee, or not delivered to the consumer or the consumer's designee as agreed. A parcel you paid for and never received is that, exactly.

The notice has to be in writing and it has to reach the creditor within sixty days after the creditor transmitted the first periodic statement that reflected the charge. Send it to the billing inquiries address the issuer designates, which is frequently not the payment address, and include your name, your account number and an explanation of why you believe there is an error. Most issuers also offer an app or web dispute form, which is fine and fast, but for anything substantial the written notice to the designated address is what unambiguously triggers the statutory process.

Once a valid notice arrives, the issuer must acknowledge it in writing within thirty days and must resolve it within two complete billing cycles, and in no event more than ninety days. While the dispute is open you may withhold payment of the disputed portion, and the creditor may not try to collect it, may not make an adverse report about your credit standing over the disputed amount, and may not accelerate the debt or close the account solely because you disputed. Keep paying the undisputed balance — withholding the whole bill turns a protected dispute into a genuine delinquency.

There is a second, separate right that people conflate with the first. Under 15 U.S.C. 1666i you may assert against the card issuer the same claims and defenses you have against the merchant, but only if you made a good faith attempt to resolve the problem with the seller, the transaction was for more than fifty dollars, and it took place in your state or within 100 miles of your billing address. Those thresholds fall away where the merchant is the card issuer, is controlled by or under common control with it, is a franchised dealer in its products, or obtained the order through a mail solicitation the issuer participated in.

Debit cards run under a different rulebook and a weaker one, because the money has already left your account. Regulation E, at 12 CFR 1005.11, gives you sixty days from the statement to notify the bank of an error, requires the bank to investigate promptly and generally to determine within ten business days whether an error occurred, and requires provisional credit if it takes the full forty-five days it is allowed. Point-of-sale debit card transactions and transfers initiated outside your state get an extended ninety-day investigation window.

In practice a bank will usually handle a debit purchase that was paid for but never delivered as a card-network chargeback rather than as a Regulation E error, since the error rules are built around transfers that were unauthorized or incorrect rather than around a merchant who failed to perform. Ask your bank which process it is applying and get the answer in writing, because the two have different deadlines and different rights attached.

Describe the dispute accurately: goods not received, not fraud. Claiming an authorized purchase was unauthorized is tempting because it moves faster, and it is a bad idea — it misstates the facts to a regulated institution, it can be reversed when the merchant produces your order record, and it can get your card reissued and your subscriptions broken for nothing. If the issuer denies a properly filed dispute, escalate to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau at consumerfinance.gov/complaint or on (855) 411-2372. The CFPB routes the complaint to the company, most of which respond within fifteen days and the rest generally within sixty, you can attach up to fifty pages of documents, and you get sixty days to respond to what the company says.

Sign up for Informed Delivery, which is free. It shows preview images of incoming letter mail and status updates for incoming and outgoing packages through a daily email digest, a dashboard and the app, and it lets you schedule redelivery and leave delivery instructions. It needs a USPS.com account and a uniquely coded mailbox — some apartment and condominium addresses do not qualify — and typically activates within three business days of registration. Its real value is that you know a parcel was delivered on the day it was delivered, rather than three days later.

Take the Postal Inspection Service's prevention advice seriously, because it is written by the people who investigate the aftermath: do not leave letters or packages sitting in the mailbox or at the door for any length of time, use USPS Hold Mail when you will be away, ask for Signature Confirmation on anything valuable, never send cash, and contact senders about anything overdue rather than waiting.

Know the limits of Package Intercept. USPS will, for a fee, stop or redirect a package in transit — but only at the request of the sender or an authorized representative, not the recipient. It requires a tracking or extra-services barcode, excludes Marketing Mail, periodicals, items addressed to commercial mail receiving agencies and redirects to PO Boxes, and no fee is charged if the interception fails. If you know a valuable parcel is heading to an address where it will sit outside, the practical fix is to ask the seller to intercept it, or to have it held at a Post Office or delivered to a locker, a work address or a neighbor who is home.

Parcels you never ordered are a different situation with an unusually clean answer. Under 39 U.S.C. 3009 you may treat unordered merchandise as a gift, with the right to retain, use, discard or dispose of it in any manner you see fit and no obligation whatsoever to the sender. The statute requires such merchandise to carry a clear and conspicuous statement telling you that, and it bars the mailer from sending you a bill or a collection notice for it. Nobody can invoice you for something you did not ask for.

The common modern version of that is brushing — a seller ships cheap goods to a real name and address it has scraped, then posts a verified review in that name. You keep the goods, but treat the parcel as a signal rather than a windfall: it means your name and address are in a data set somebody is using, so check your card and marketplace accounts for orders you did not place and consider whether a credit freeze is warranted. Never scan a QR code printed on an unexpected parcel or its packing slip.

Parcels addressed to somebody else are not yours, whatever the sender owes the person named. Hand them back to the carrier, and if wrong-address deliveries are persistent raise it as a delivery service complaint.

When every route stalls, escalate outward rather than repeating yourself. State consumer protection offices handle complaints against businesses and investigate scams and fraud, and USA.gov maintains a directory of them by state and territory; a state attorney general's consumer division is the next step above that. Small claims court exists precisely for disputes of this size, does not usually need a lawyer, and a seller that ignored six emails frequently settles when served. For a card issuer or bank that mishandled a dispute, the CFPB is the route, and for the Postal Service itself the Consumer Advocate sits above ordinary customer service.