Received a parcel with my name I never ordered

5 comments

1. Do not open it. Chances are there are seeds inside, and if you do find seeds, do not and I mean, do NOT plant it! This scam was going on in the US I believe couple of years ago. It’s known as a brushing scam.

   https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/01/23/business/package-didnt-order-brushing

   Basically a scam where they send you a package, want you to review it or something of that nature.

2. Sometimes, in order to review a product, there’s a requirement that you have first bought the product. But if you’re making dozens of 5-star reviews to boost the rating of your company’s own product on a marketplace, you need a different address for every purchase. So random addresses are used – it doesn’t matter where the product goes, the company just cares that it looks vaguely legit so their reviews don’t get taken down. Then something small needs to be sent so the marketplace system can tell that something was posted.

3. Some sellers on AliExpress try to inflate their sales by sending stuff to random addresses. I think in some cases they needed extra shipments to get into the cheaper tier for shipping… Think of it as a “product sample”. See if you can use the product, or throw it away if not.

4. Lesson number one in every yearly security instruction I’ve ever gotten: never plug in any unsolicitedly received hard ware.

5. Just ignore it and throw it away. You might have ordered from a Chinese seller in the past, which uses your adress to clean their warehouse every now and then. They usually do that because it’s cheaper to send out random stuff to people instead of just throwing it away.