Mail is delivered to more than 160 million addresses in the U.S. six days a week. Sadly, the holidays provide the perfect preying ground for thieves to steal it. An Omaha woman's watchful eye caught a thief in the act. She took action to keep her neighborhood from being preyed on again.

"There's neighbors everywhere. There are always kids playing," says Ray Huse as he describes his block. "There's a sense of a neighborhood being a close knit community, which some neighborhoods I've lived in didn't really have that, so that's one of the reasons why we wanted to stay in this neighborhood when we outgrew our last house."

Huse and his family have lived in the Prairie Lane neighborhood near 114th and Spring for more than 10 years. "Generally, we are a neighborhood who looks out for each other pretty well," he says.

The neighborhood has a watch program and there are signs around that warn potential thieves of that.

One neighbor watching on Tuesday afternoon saw a man drive up to her mailbox and stop. She says he was in a small black vehicle, nothing resembling the U.S. Postal Service. She had just put out some outgoing mail, and put the flag up.

The woman saw the suspect drive off and shortly afterwards, she came out to her mail box to check because she thought maybe he had put something inside. When she opened it up, she found that all of her outgoing mail had been stolen, including two checks.

She called the president of the neighborhood association who sent an email to everyone in the neighborhood.

"It's kind of disappointing that someone would target or cruise the neighborhood and look out for those kinds of things." Huse is cautious with all of his mail already, but he's grateful a neighbor stepped up to stop further crime.

"That kind of activity is becoming more common and any neighborhood that hasn't been hit, I guess is fair game for it at some point." Huse says it's a sad commentary on the state of things in general. He just hopes the crime stays out of this neighborhood.

The victim, who did not want to be identified, says that she was able to call and cancel the checks right away.

She had a chat with the mailman, he told her not put her flag up for outgoing mail anymore, so as not to flag down any more opportunities for thieves.

The neighborhood association has a planned meeting this Tuesday night, no doubt the recent theft will be a topic of conversation.