A year ago, mail was stolen from our roadside mailbox.

The circumstances were quite unusual. Let me first share how most people respond when I mention that our mail was stolen: "Well, that's illegal!"

Probably explains why they did it during the middle of the night, then.

It was a Saturday and, on Saturdays especially in the summertime,

my husband and I are never clear on who gets the mail. We try to cover it between the two of us but there have been a couple of times when the mail sits in the box overnight into Sunday morning.

During the week, it's not a problem: I bring in the mail. On Saturdays, we fall out of our usual routine of clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Not that I need to make excuses for what happened. Having our mail stolen is in no way our own fault. But, in this case, neither of us brought in the mail and each of us thought that the other had.

That afternoon, I had spent some time outside with Timmy, then two years old, playing on the driveway and in the front yard. Timmy had this thing for the mailbox flag: he liked to flip it up. When it was time to go into the house, he left the flag up. I didn't think anything about it. I thought the mail had been brought in already.

At a neighbor's house on Monday morning with other women from the neighborhood, one asked,

"Teresa, what was the policeman doing at your house early on Sunday morning?"

I hadn't any idea. Neither Jeff nor myself talked with a policeman.

The neighbor said that he was standing at the mailbox, then at our front door. We never heard him.

Another woman shared that her mailbox was knocked over completely and that the policeman brought it up to her front porch on Sunday morning. I looked at our mailbox when I got home. It seemed a little crooked and dented on one side.

On Tuesday evening, a man from down the street dropped off pieces of our mail that he had found in his yard. Most of it was junk mail. One piece was an empty bank statement envelope. He told us that he had placed a credit card payment, stub and check, in his mailbox on Saturday night and put the flag up. On Sunday morning, the payment envelope was gone and his mailbox was smashed.

I put the clues together: they checked mailboxes with raised flags for outgoing mail. Our flag was up even though our mail wasn't outgoing.

From the envelope alone, I couldn't tell which account's statement had been inside. I looked for other recent bank account statements and concluded that it was my personal checking account. To play it safe, the bank recommended changing all of our account numbers.

In talking with their fraud department -- which I learned over time is a fraud in itself -- I asked in practical terms how could the information gleaned from a bank statement be used against us? My bank routing and account information is clearly printed on every check I write. The statement itself divulged no more sensitive information than any check. I was assured, "Oh, you would be surprised. We've seen accounts cleaned out in a matter of hours."

I resisted still because we have had these same account numbers for fifteen years. I have the numbers memorized. And the Patriot Act monitors the creation of every new bank account. I didn't want that exposure. Not to mention the hassle of migrating all of our automatic clearing house (ACH) or electronic funds transfer (EFT) to the new accounts.

I learned that most utilities have two parallel, unintegrated billing systems: a newer web-based system and an older data center system. Changes to one do not filter to the other. I took me a day to figure out what was going on - that even automatic online bill payment systems were not the same system as zipcheck.

My Cingular cell phone bill was paid twice in one month, via the old system and the new. I straightened that out.

For the life of me, the cable company took about 11 months to migrate over. And I wasn't even aware of the glitch until we finally closed out the old accounts and discovered that the cable company was still trying to post against them! I had mailed them a cancelled check, I had updated my account on their web site, I had given the new account information to their representatives over the telephone. Come on, really!

A couple of weeks after the mail was stolen, I was in the post office talking with the clerk. I asked her what she knew about it and she said that two entire streets in town were vandalized, mailboxes down and mail stolen. There was nothing they could do.

Banks are always bragging about their fraud departments but, when push comes to shove, it's just talk. There's no finesse, no sophistication and no automation. The lion's share of the work to protect assets falls to the consumer. And in the back of my mind I'm thinking that we weren't really vulnerable anyway. All of that work and frustration and time on the phone (and time on hold) and those young punks had no idea how to exploit what they stole.