Would it be Christmas or your biggest nightmare to have over 100 Amazon packages delivered to your door? That was a question for one woman after she recently went through the orders that arrived unannounced.
Cindy Smith said the boxes started showing up at her Prince William County home one day and soon she had received dozens of random items, including about 1,000 headlamps, 800 glue guns and dozens of pairs of binoculars.
“A lot of people told me I was weird,” Smith said. “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 listed on the packages, Lixiao Zhang, was 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.
Amazon officials have looked into both incidents and discovered that the packages delivered to Smith 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. “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 reported that the seller’s account has been closed. If you ever need a glue gun, it looks like you should be knocking on Smith’s door.