In a bizarre incident, a US woman received more than 100 packages from Amazon she never ordered, which was likely part of a Chinese vendor's money-saving scheme.
The Amazon boxes contained about 1,000 headlamps, 800 glue guns, and dozens of binoculars for children, reports Insider quoting CBS affiliate station WUSA.
Cindy Smith of Virginia state in the US said she never ordered those from Amazon. "It's a lot of packages. I didn't order them and they kept coming from everybody," she told WUSA.
Smith drove around the town, giving packages to those who would just take them. "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 was quoted as saying.
"All my neighbours got glue guns or headlamps. I gave them to dog shelters, to veterinary clinics," she added. These packages were addressed to someone called Lixiao Zhang.
According to reports, the incident is more likely linked to a different kind of vendor scheme, one that involves sellers trying to remove unsold merchandise from Amazon fulfillment centres. WUSA traced the returned packaging labels to 15 fulfillment centers in nine different US states.
Sellers in China who need to get their products out of Amazon warehouses pick random addresses and send their unwanted products there, he said, adding: "It's just cheaper for them to do so."
Amazon said in a statement that the seller account had violated the company's policy by engaging in "abusive activity" and the account has been closed.
Indo-Asian News Service