Why Mail Fraud Is a Federal Crime

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Sharon Dolisi was 79 years old when federal agents came for her in St. James, Missouri.

The charge was not fraud in the ordinary sense. It was felony mail fraud, conspiracy to commit mail fraud, and wire fraud.

According to the Postal Inspection Service, Dolisi was a suspect in a scheme that told victims across the country they had won the Mega Millions lottery or the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes. They would collect their winnings, the pitch went, once they prepaid thousands of dollars in taxes and fees.

The money moved through the U.S. mail. She is suspected of having taken in more than $2.1 million.

Notice what made this a federal case. Not the size of the theft. Not the age of the victims. The mail.

Here is the short answer to why mail fraud is a federal crime. The Constitution hands Congress the power to establish post offices and post roads, and Congress long ago decided that using its national mail system as a tool for swindling was a national problem worth punishing. Once a scheme to cheat someone reaches into the mail, or into a private carrier like FedEx, it crosses into federal territory, even when everyone involved lives on the same street.

To win a conviction, prosecutors have to prove three things beyond a reasonable doubt. First, that the defendant knowingly took part in a scheme to defraud. Second, that they acted with a specific intent to deceive. Third, that they used or caused the use of the mail to carry the scheme forward. That third element is the jurisdictional key. It is also, as we will see, remarkably easy to satisfy.

The Nineteenth-Century Swindle That Started It All

The problem was older than the statute. As the postal network spread across the growing country, con artists realized they could reach victims a thousand miles away without ever leaving home.

By 1865, according to the Postal Inspection Service’s history of the statute, the public was being hit hard by mail-based schemes: promises of land, lotteries, and gifts that rarely materialized. Senator James Dixon of Connecticut introduced a bill in 1866 to protect both the public and the postal system from these abuses.

Congress’s first real attempt came in 1868. The law made it illegal “to deposit in a post office to be sent by mail, any letters or circulars concerning lotteries, so-called gift concerts, or similar enterprises offering prizes of any pretext whatsoever.”

It barely worked.

The language was vague, and postal employees were nervous about enforcing it. An older statute from 1836 punished mail workers who unlawfully detained letters, so an inspector who pulled a suspicious circular risked getting himself in trouble. Swindlers, meanwhile, simply redesigned their offers to slip past the narrow wording about lotteries and prizes.

That failure taught Congress something. Banning specific categories of mail content was a losing game, because fraudsters adapt faster than statutes.

The 1872 Statute and the Birth of Federal Jurisdiction

The turn came in 1872. Representative John A. Farnsworth of Illinois introduced a bill that, after revisions by the Forty-second Congress, became the first federal statute aimed specifically at mail fraud, enacted on June 8 of that year as part of a broader overhaul of postal law.

Congress “enacted the first statute criminalizing mail fraud in 1872” as part of that recodification effort.

The new law reached any person, inside or outside the United States, who intended to use the mails to defraud another. It was a misdemeanor, punishable by fine or imprisonment. But the conceptual move mattered more than the penalty. Congress had stopped chasing particular scams and started targeting the act of using the mail as a vehicle for deception.

Placing the offense inside a postal package was not an accident. The mail was a national institution, and abusing it threatened the trust and efficiency of the whole system, not just the pocketbook of one victim.

That is the jurisdictional hook that survives today. Federal liability attaches to the use of the mails, not to where the schemers or victims happen to sit. This is why a purely local con becomes a federal matter the moment an envelope enters the stream.

How “Scheme to Defraud” Became So Broad

The early statute reached anyone who had “devised or intend[ed] to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud.” What that language covered was left to the courts, and the courts read it generously from the start.

In 1896, the Supreme Court decided Durland v. United States. John Durland had used the mail to promote a bond scheme he never intended to honor. He argued the fraud statute reached only lies about existing facts, not broken promises about the future.

The Court disagreed, and the language it chose set the tone for the next century. The statute, it held, “includes everything designed to defraud by representations as to the past or present, or suggestions and promises as to the future.” What mattered was not the form of the lie. As the Court put it, “The significant fact is the intent and purpose.”

Durland’s conviction was affirmed. And the phrase “scheme to defraud” was now roomy enough to hold almost any dishonest plan.

Congress ratified that reading in 1909, when it codified the statute with the added clause covering schemes “for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises.” When Title 18 of the U.S. Code was assembled in 1948, the mail fraud provision took its modern address: 18 U.S.C. section 1341, tracing back through the 1940 code to the Act of March 4, 1909.

The core has barely moved since. Reviewing that history in 1987, the Supreme Court noted that the statute’s last substantive amendment was the 1909 codification of the Durland decision; a Congressional Research Service summary later described the law as having come down essentially unchanged despite penalty increases and amendments meant to confirm its breadth.

The following table traces how the statute grew from a narrow postal-protection measure into the broad tool prosecutors use today.

Sources: U.S. Postal Inspection Service, 18 U.S.C. § 1341, and Supreme Court opinions.

What the Government Actually Has to Prove

Strip away the history and the offense comes down to three parts. The government must prove three elements beyond a reasonable doubt: the defendant’s knowing and willing participation in a scheme to defraud, the intent to defraud, and the use of the mails in furtherance of the scheme.

Start with intent, because it is the element that matters most for guilt. Mail fraud isn’t a crime you can commit by accident. The Third Circuit’s model jury instructions define “intent to defraud” as acting knowingly and with the purpose to deceive or cheat. They treat good faith as a complete defense, because an honest belief in the legitimacy of what you were doing negates the intent the statute requires.

That is a real limit, at least on paper.

The deception also has to be material.

The government does not have to prove anyone actually lost money. Prosecutors need only show the defendant contemplated some actual harm or injury to the victims. The focus is on the design of the scheme and the state of the schemer’s mind, not on whether the con succeeded.

The Mailing Element Is Thinner Than You Think

The third element is the one that makes the whole thing federal, and it is the loosest of the three.

The statute demands that a mailing be made “for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice or attempting so to do,” and it sweeps in “any matter or thing whatever” placed in the mail. Since a 1990s amendment, it also covers anything the defendant “deposits or causes to be deposited any matter or thing whatever to be sent or delivered by any private or commercial interstate carrier.”

So the hook is no longer even limited to the Postal Service. Ship it by FedEx and the same federal law applies.

The mailing does not have to contain the lie. It does not have to be the thing that lured the victim in. The mailing need not be an essential element of the scheme, only connected to an essential element, and a qualifying mailing may, standing alone, be routine, innocent, or even self-defeating.

You do not even have to mail anything yourself. The government need only show you “caused” a mailing, meaning the use of the mail was a reasonably foreseeable consequence of your scheme. A billing statement, a confirmation notice, a check sent by a bank you never touched: any of these can make the case federal.

Think of the mailing element less like a wall and more like a tripwire. Almost any commercial fraud brushes against it eventually.

Why Prosecutors Love It, and Why Some Scholars Worry

That breadth is exactly why mail fraud has become a workhorse of federal white-collar enforcement. When the underlying offense is hard to prove, mail fraud is often available as a reliable backstop.

Consider the Ponzi case federal prosecutors brought in Las Vegas. According to the Justice Department, a grand jury charged two investment company executives with conspiracy, securities fraud, and mail fraud in a $1.5 billion scheme. Over several years, the defendants solicited a large number of people to invest a substantial sum, and they caused the preparation of false account statements that overstated returns and hid the companies’ true condition.

The securities charges carried the main argument. The mail fraud counts rode along on the paperwork.

Professor Peter J. Henning of Wayne State University Law School argued in an article titled “Maybe it Should Just Be Called Federal Fraud: The Changing Nature of the Mail Fraud Statute” that Congress and the courts had transformed section 1341 into a general federal fraud statute, having shed the last remaining limit to protecting the integrity of the mails.

Because each mailing counts as a separate offense, one continuous fraud can be sliced into many charges. A New York defense firm characterizes section 1341 as “the federal prosecutor’s favorite weapon” for precisely that reason. It notes that ten mailed invoices could in theory be charged as ten counts, and that each count of standard mail fraud carries up to 20 years, according to a nyccriminalattorneys.com summary.

The penalties are steep. If the fraud affects a financial institution, or involves benefits tied to a presidentially declared disaster, the ceiling jumps to “not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned not more than 30 years, or both”. Congress raised the base maximum from five to twenty years in 2002, and added the 30-year enhancement in 2008.

How often does the theoretical maximum matter? Almost never at trial, because trials are rare. Of the 66,662 cases reported to the U.S. Sentencing Commission in fiscal 2025, 4,804 (7 percent) involved Theft, Property Destruction, and Fraud, the category that captures mail fraud. Within that category, 91.8 percent of cases were resolved by guilty plea, with 8.2 percent going to trial.

The point of a multi-count indictment is not to secure a 200-year sentence. Faced with stacked counts and sentences that grow with the amount stolen, most defendants negotiate rather than gamble at trial.

The Fights Over What Counts as “Property”

For all its breadth, the statute has a real limit, and the Supreme Court keeps rebuilding it around the same idea: fraud is about money or property.

The landmark is McNally v. United States, decided in 1987. Prosecutors had used mail fraud against Kentucky officials on the theory that corruption deprived citizens of their intangible right to honest government. The Court balked.

The words “to defraud,” the opinion said, commonly refer “to wronging one in his property rights by dishonest methods or schemes.” Rather than read the statute to draw the federal government into setting standards of disclosure and good government for local and state officials, the Court held that the statute was limited in scope to protecting property rights.

Congress responded within a year. In 1988 it enacted 18 U.S.C. section 1346, defining “scheme or artifice to defraud” to include a scheme to deprive another of “the intangible right of honest services.” The honest-services theory the Court had killed was back, this time in statutory text.

But the property principle keeps reasserting itself. In 2023, in Ciminelli v. United States, the Court rejected the “right to control” theory, under which withholding valuable economic information counted as a property deprivation. That kind of interest, the Court said, “is not a traditional property” right.

The Court has also held that a defendant who “induces a victim to enter into a transaction under materially false pretenses may be convicted of federal fraud,” even without intending to cause economic loss. The catch, and it is a real one, is that “The misrepresentation must be material.”

Put those cases side by side and you can see the Court doing something almost delicate. It ties fraud to traditional property while refusing to require proof that the victim came out behind.

The Federalism Question Nobody Has Settled

Underneath the property fights sits a bigger unresolved worry: whether mail fraud lets Washington reach into matters that belong to the states.

George D. Brown, who spent more than 50 years as a professor at Boston College Law School, serving as interim dean from 2010 to 2011 before continuing as professor emeritus after retiring in 2021, argued in a Cornell Law Review article, Should Federalism Shield Corruption?—Mail Fraud, State Law and Post-Lopez Analysis, that prosecuting state and local officials under mail fraud raises serious federalism concerns, because nearly any local fraud or corruption that touches a mailing can be pulled into federal court even where state law already covers it.

Geraldine Szott Moohr, professor emerita at the University of Houston Law Center, pressed the point further, contending that the intangible-rights and honest-services doctrines are too vague to enforce fairly (“void for vagueness”) and raise concerns about federalism, the balance of power between branches, and free speech. In her telling, letting prosecutors define “honest services” turns them into national overseers of state and local ethics.

The Supreme Court has not been deaf to this. Its narrowing in McNally, Ciminelli, and the honest-services cases reflects unease about federal criminal law crowding out the states. Whether the fixes work is exactly what the scholars dispute.

Where the Line Keeps Getting Drawn

The clearest way to see the law’s limits is to watch convictions get reversed.

The Supreme Court vacated the honest-services mail fraud convictions of media executive Conrad Black, holding that the honest-services statute criminalizes only schemes involving bribes or kickbacks. Jury instructions that swept more broadly were wrong.

The Seventh Circuit has reversed mail and wire fraud convictions where an indictment alleged only a scheme to defraud without properly pleading materiality, following the Supreme Court’s guidance in Neder.

These are the guardrails. They are also narrow, and they mostly reward defendants who can afford to litigate every element to the appellate level.

The everyday reality is closer to the cases the Postal Inspection Service publicizes. A former U.S. Postal Inspector, Scott Kelley of Pembroke, Massachusetts, was charged in a 45-count indictment in Boston for allegedly stealing over $330,000 in cash from packages mailed by elderly victims, then laundering it.

His indictment folded five counts of mail fraud into a much larger stack, each count carrying, in the government’s words, a sentence of up to 20 years in prison. Even the people sworn to protect the mail get prosecuted under the mail fraud law when they abuse it.

If you think you have been targeted by a mail-based scheme, our guide to reporting mail fraud and scams walks through the steps, and our look at the postal inspectors who investigate these cases covers how they build them.

What Kousisis Sets in Motion

The 2025 Kousisis decision is the newest wrinkle, and its consequences are still unfolding.

By confirming that “The fraudulent-inducement theory is consistent with both the text of the wire fraud statute and our precedent interpreting it,” the Court told prosecutors they need not prove a victim lost a dollar, only that a material lie induced the deal. Because the mail and wire fraud statutes are read together, the ruling applies to mail fraud too.

That raises a live question. If economic loss is off the table, whether the lie really mattered becomes the whole ballgame, the last real filter between an aggressive sales pitch and a federal felony.

In the run of cases now working through the lower courts, the fights will be about what makes a misrepresentation material enough to count, and how far “obtain,” which the Court said “means to gain possession or control,” can stretch in commercial deals where both sides got roughly what they paid for.

The statute began as a shield for the nineteenth-century mail. A century and a half later, courts are still arguing about how much of modern commercial life it was ever meant to police. That argument is not close to over.

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