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July 27 (UPI) — A Virginia woman received more than 100 Amazon packages she didn’t order, including headlamps, glue guns and binoculars.
Cindy Smith said the boxes recently started showing up at her Prince William County home and soon she had received about 1,000 headlamps, 800 glue guns and dozens of pairs of binoculars.
“A lot of people told me I was weird,” Smith told WUSA-TV. “I would drive around with headlamps and glue guns in the car. I gave them to everybody I met.”
The boxes bore Smith’s address, but the name Lixiao Zhang, a name Smith said she had never heard before.
“We initially thought it was a brushing scam,” Smith said, referring to the process of an online vendor creating fake sales of their products in order to artificially inflate their number of 5-star reviews.
Liz Geltman of Washington, D.C., faced a similar situation in May, when her house was quickly filled with packages of children’s sheets she hadn’t ordered.
Amazon officials said they looked into both incidents, and discovered both Smith and Geltman’s packages were the result of vendors having packages shipped to random addresses in order to remove unsold merchandise from Amazon fulfillment centers.
“It all boils down to money,” New York-based attorney CJ Rosenbaum said of the scheme. “You have sellers located in China, who are just picking random addresses. And then when they need to get their products out of Amazon’s warehouses, they’re just having them sent there, because it’s just cheaper for them to do so.”
Amazon said the seller’s account has been closed.
It was unclear whether a similar scam was responsible for Connie Mathews of Sacramento, Calif., receiving about 100 space heaters she never ordered from Amazon in December 2022.
