How to Identify the Owner of a Post Office Box

Sometimes as a PI, you will be asked to locate or identify the physical address of the owner of a PO Box or Post Office Box (PMB). This is often called a post office box break or a reverse post office box.

This can often be accomplished with a database lookup if you have access to a database that uses credit headers. When people have a PO Box, they will often use that address for their car bills or payments, utility bills, etc. and the PO Box will appear on your credit headers as an alternate address.

If it’s not there, you can get the information by contacting the United States Postal Service using a form available on the USPS website. This form requires you to disclose the reason you need the information. The USPS will only release the information if it is attempting to perform a legal service on the proper person, such as a subpoena. They even require a case number in the court where the case will be tried.

Sometimes these methods will still fail. The box owner may have moved since he opened the box and no longer lives at the address he provided to the USPS. It’s even possible that the PO Box owner used a fake ID when he opened the PO Box account.

You can try to pretext the PMB owner by mailing them professional looking stuff, free offers, maybe even a love letter, anything to trick the owner into revealing their identity. These submissions should always include a trap line phone number with call pickup. If the owner of the mailbox calls, you’ll get the information from him and you can track him that way.

This may seem like a lot of work for a simple break in a post office box. Placing traps, obtaining credit headers, pretext postcard printing. Many investigators like to outsource this type of work and buy the information from an investigator who is already set up to obtain this type of information on a routine basis.

There is an old saying that there is no reason to reinvent the wheel. This is especially true when it comes to private investigators who specialize in obtaining information and selling it to other investigators who are involved in a much larger and more complicated investigation.

This would not only apply to a P.O. box outage, but could be a simple location or phone outage.