A postal worker in the East Bay was held at gunpoint earlier this week, surveillance footage shows, and forced to give up her mailbox keys and cellphone.  

The video, published by KTVU, shows two masked men run up behind a U.S. Postal Service worker outside a residential mailbox, grab her and point a gun at her. 

The robbery happened Monday in broad daylight, at approximately 4:30 p.m., in Dublin near the cul-de-sac of Obispo Court, the Dublin Police Services said in a news release. The robbers took the worker’s mailbox key and her phone, police said. After grabbing the items, the two men left the scene on foot. 

Dublin Police Services said the woman was not physically hurt during the incident. They are still working to find the suspects, alongside the U.S. Postal Inspectors Office, the statement said.

Monday’s robbery is one of several instances where letter carriers have been robbed in the Bay Area in recent months. There have been at least six robberies of mail carriers in the Bay Area in the last month, KTVU reported.

A postal worker was robbed Wednesday in Gilroy, and law enforcement is trying to determine if the robbers are the same ones who carried out the Dublin robbery, Dublin Police Services Capt. Miguel Campos told SFGATE.

NBC Bay Area reported that the Postal Service is offering a $150,000 reward for help locating “at least two” people who robbed a postal worker in Oakland May 2. Shortly before that, on April 25, a mail carrier was robbed at gunpoint in San Carlos, the outlet reported. And in February, four teens robbed a postal worker in Fremont, also in broad daylight. 

Postal workers have experienced an uptick in violent attacks in recent years, in which thieves steal their master keys to gain access to mailboxes. 

In 2023, about 61% of California’s postal worker robberies happened in the Bay Area, according to data from the Postal Service. The most robberies happened in Oakland and San Francisco, the data showed.

The robberies are a nationwide trend in the last few years, with letter carrier robberies increasing by 543% between Postal Service fiscal years 2019 and 2022, according to data from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service released in fall 2023. The agency reported that 64 robberies happened between October 2018 and September 2019, and 412 were reported between October 2021 and September 2022. 

The Postal Service did say this March that arrests made by the Postal Inspection Service related to letter carrier robberies are on the rise, while the number of robberies reported has decreased.

There was an increase in robberies and instances of mail theft at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic as thieves targeted stimulus checks that were mailed starting in April 2020, according to a 2020 report from the Postal Inspection Service.