Atlanta (CNN) Sixteen US Postal Service workers got sentences of between three to nine years in federal prison for accepting bribes to deliver cocaine on their routes in Atlanta.

Drug traffickers bribed the postal workers, sometimes with amounts as low as $250, to deliver drugs to designated addresses, the US Attorney's Office said in a statement this week.

"US Postal Service workers are typically valuable members of the community, entrusted to deliver the mail every day to our homes," US Attorney Byung J. Pak said. "This important operation identified and prosecuted 16 corrupt individuals who chose to abuse that trust and instead used their positions to bring what they thought were large amounts of dangerous drugs into those same communities for a

Operation discovered in 2015

Federal agents learned about the operation in 2015, while working to take down a drug trafficking organization in Atlanta. Drug traffickers targeted postal workers because their jobs made it less likely for them to be caught by law enforcement officials, federal authorities said.

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