A baffled Virginia woman says she has been bombarded with more than 100 Amazon packages that have turned up on her doorstep of late — but she never actually ordered any of them.
Cindy Smith said she quickly became confused when the random deliveries addressed to a “Lixiao Zhang” recently started piling up outside her Prince William County home, WUSA reported.
“They came from everybody,” Smith said. “FedEx, Amazon, all of them were delivering boxes.”
“It’s a lot of packages,” she continued. “I didn’t order them.”
The mounds of boxes ended up bizarrely containing 1,000 headlamps for running and biking, 800 glue guns and dozens of children’s binoculars, Smith said.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many days it took for the hundred-odd packages to pile up at Smith’s home.
Footage taken by the local outlet showed dozens of boxes piled up on her doorstep and in her basement.
In a bid to get rid of the products and avoid them being dumped in a landfill, Smith said, she started handing them out to those in her neighborhood.
“A lot of people told me I was weird … I would drive around with headlamps and glue guns in the car. I gave them to everybody I met,” she said.
“All my neighbors got glue guns or headlamps,” Smith continued. “I gave them to dog shelters, to veterinary clinics. I went to Burger King one day, and I was like, ‘I have a gift for you.'”
Smith said she immediately thought the packages were part a “brushing scam.”
The so-called brushing scheme involves an online vendor creating a fake sale of their product and then sending the package to a random address so they boost their Amazon 5-star review rating.
But a probe determined Smith’s incident was more likely tied to a different “vendor returns” scheme that involves sellers trying to remove unsold products from various Amazon fulfillment centers.
The return packaging labels tied to the packages Smith received were traced to 15 fulfillment centers in nine different states.
“It all boils down to money,” said CJ Rosenbaum, a New York attorney who represents vendors who 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.”
Following a probe, Amazon confirmed that the person named on the packages, Lixiao Zhang, had violated policy and their account had since been closed.
“Amazon has systems in place to detect suspicious behavior by sellers, and teams in place to investigate and stop prohibited activity,” an Amazon spokesperson said.
“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.”
