A 46-year-old Glendale man has pleaded guilty to leading a 14-month scheme that stole 30 United States Postal Service vehicles and rifled through mail belonging to at least 232 people across the Los Angeles area. Vegen Hartoonian admitted to conspiring with a crew that tailed mail carriers in rented vehicles, then swooped in to grab postal trucks the moment drivers stepped away to make deliveries.
According to the Department of Justice, Hartoonian and his co-conspirators used a rotating fleet of rented vehicles — including a Dodge Caravan, BMW and GMC SUVs, and a Mitsubishi Outlander — to follow USPS mail carriers along their routes between September 2023 and November 2024. Prosecutors say at least one of those rental vehicles was paid for using stolen credit card information, a detail that underscores how deeply identity theft was woven into the operation from the start. As reported by CBS Los Angeles, the 30 stolen USPS trucks carried a combined value of $349,530, or roughly $11,651 apiece.
How the Crew Operated
Once mail carriers left their trucks to deliver packages on foot, Hartoonian and his accomplices allegedly moved in and drove off with the vehicles, per CBS Los Angeles digital producer Matthew Rodriguez's reporting. The group then stole the mail inside and drove the trucks to another location, according to the outlet's account. Prosecutors say the scheme also netted about 100 stolen credit and debit cards along the way.
One specific act detailed in Hartoonian's plea agreement shows how the credit card theft and vehicle theft fed into each other. In January 2024, according to the Department of Justice, Hartoonian admitted to unlawfully possessing a victim's credit card number specifically to facilitate the theft of a postal vehicle and the mail inside it in Los Angeles County.
A Documented History With Postal Tools
Hartoonian's connection to postal theft equipment did not begin with this conspiracy. Back in January 2021, Glendale police arrested him at a hotel on West Glenoaks Boulevard on parole violations and drug charges, according to the Crescenta Valley Weekly. Officers seized methamphetamine, counterfeit bills, and an object resembling a postal arrow key — the type used to open community mailboxes — while Hartoonian was on parole for burglary at the time, the paper reported.
Hartoonian was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit theft of government property and one count of aggravated identity theft, CBS Los Angeles reports. He faces a maximum sentence of seven years in federal prison across both counts. Under 18 U.S.C. § 1028A, a conviction for aggravated identity theft carries a mandatory minimum of two years that must be served consecutively to any other sentence, according to Bulldog Law — meaning federal judges have no statutory authority to let that portion run concurrently with the rest of his punishment.
Sentencing and Co-Defendants
United States District Judge Christina A. Snyder has scheduled Hartoonian's federal sentencing hearing for December 7, per the Department of Justice. Court records show he has been held in federal custody since October 2025 alongside co-defendants Jose Arviso, a 50-year-old San Bernardino resident; Sanjay Varma, 44, of Pasadena; and Juan Nuñez, 25, of Highland Park — all three of whom have also pleaded guilty to federal charges, according to CBS Los Angeles.
A fifth co-defendant, 43-year-old Mark Anthony Quitugua of Lincoln Heights, remains free on a $10,000 bond and has pleaded not guilty. His trial is scheduled for January 2027, leaving open questions about the full scope of the conspiracy until that proceeding concludes.
Investigators and the Bigger Picture
The case was investigated by the United States Postal Inspection Service and is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Neil P. Thakor of the Public Corruption and Civil Rights Section, which handles complex federal crime cases in the Central District of California, per the Department of Justice.
The Glendale case lands amid a broader national surge in mail crime. The joint USPS and Postal Inspection Service campaign known as Project Safe Delivery recorded more than 3,600 mail theft arrests and 500 letter carrier robbery arrests nationwide between its May 2023 launch and March 2026, according to National Mailboxes. The same figures show the USPS Office of Inspector General logged more than 800,000 mail theft complaints nationwide between fiscal years 2023 and 2025, with complaint volumes rising in nearly every regional division in 2025.
Hoodline previously reported on a related Southern California case, the Highland Park mail theft indictment, which similarly combined stolen identities with financial fraud. Standard USPS delivery vehicles complicate these investigations in one specific way: they carry no state-issued license plates, relying instead on seven-digit federal fleet serial numbers, which means municipal police must coordinate directly with federal post offices to verify missing units.
