Regulation needed to stamp out courier crime

Rules and safeguards

According to Beijing's municipal government, a regulation asking express companies to delete client information on a regular basis was put out for public consultation in March. However, Zhao said that passing government regulations may take some time, so authorities are focusing initially on establishing rules with the industry so that courier companies can be self-regulating in the first instance.

A delivery man with SF Express who gave only his surname, Ge, said his company requires delivery workers to hand in delivery receipts every day, but he has no idea what happens to the receipts or the information on them.

Zhou Ye, head of the information office of YTO Express, said client information is stored for about six months for analysis so that the company can keep in touch with them. However, he said that his company has its own methods of ensuring that customer information is not misused.

"We've recorded our customers' information on an e-database, avoiding delivery men selling it for money and aiming to improve our work efficiency," Zhou Ye said.

"We provide delivery men with handheld terminals to record whether products have been successfully delivered or not, which can prevent someone pretending to be one of our workers from stealing deliveries and also supervise our employees' delivery process," he said.

However, Wang Tingting, a prosecutor in Chaoyang district, said the express courier industry still has major loopholes in its security provisions.

"The number of packages handled by each company is huge and the security procedures during storage are substandard," she said. "This provides opportunities for delivery men to do bad things and makes detection difficult."

Prosecutors said express companies should boost their security systems during parcel processing, making use of technologies such as closed-circuit TV cameras, which might reduce the numbers of thefts.

But it is not only the companies that need to work harder to stamp out the problem.

Chen Linhua, secretary-general of Shanghai Express Trade Association, said customers "should also enhance awareness and destroy the delivery receipts".

Zhang Ying, 26, a civil servant from Wuxi, Jiangsu province, who is interested in online shopping, said she always uses her workplace address and even writes a fake name on bills, but she is still worried about slack security in courier delivery systems.

"A strange man called me to sell insurance, and he called me by the fake name I had used with a delivery man," she said. "It must be the express company that sold my information."