A woman in Virginia, US, says she has been bombarded with hundreds of packages from Amazon for days without actually placing an order. The boxes contained about 1,000 headlamps for running and biking, 800 glue guns and dozens upon dozens of children’s binoculars, CBS News affiliate WUSA reported.
“They came from everybody,” Cindy Smith told WUSA. “FedEx, Amazon, all of them were delivering boxes.” In all, more than 100 Amazon boxes turned up at her home in Prince William County.
The deliveries made at her place were addressed to “Lixiao Zhang”, however, Smith claimed that no such person lived at the address.
In order to get rid of these items, Smith, who is an environmental science professor and conservationist, took to driving around the town with headlamps, glue guns and binoculars, giving them to people she would meet. “A lot of people told me I was weird,” Smith said.
Smith initially thought she was a victim of a “brushing scam”, where vendors send packages of their products to a random address, so they can boost their rating. However, it was an entirely different vendor scheme, as per WUSA, where vendors try to get rid of unsold items from Amazon fulfilment centres.
“It all boils down to money,” said CJ Rosenbaum, a New York Attorney that represents companies that sell on Amazon. “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 later launched an investigation and discovered the seller, Lixiao Zhang, violated Amazon policy by creating removal orders with Cindy Smith’s address.
“Amazon has systems in place to detect suspicious behavior by sellers, and teams in place to investigate and stop prohibited activity. The seller account that was engaged in this abusive activity has been closed. There is no place for fraud at Amazon and we will continue to pursue all measures to protect our store and hold bad actors accountable,” WUSA quoted an Amazon spokesperson as saying.
