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Americans Are Receiving Unordered Parcels from E-Criminals
- fapjacks 9y agoI had an interesting experience recently. I ordered a cheap $20 multimeter from Amazon (which was highly rated on EEVblog), which was shipped from China. Interestingly, the Chinese seller shipped me a single little worthless plastic packet of heat-shrink remote control covers (which somewhat humorously I can imagine totally being a thing in Asia, heat-shrink-wrapping all the remotes in plastic, sort of like a couch in plastic). This was what the tracking number package was for, and so I immediately hit my bookmark to chat with an Amazon rep to report fraud. I went through all the motions, they refunded me the amount, I left a negative review. But then that night, I got an email from the seller saying "That was your free gift, the multimeter should be there soon" and indeed, the actual multimeter showed up the next day, albeit with another tracking number. The multimeter was definitely shipped from China the same as the garbage package (via epacket, the subsidized, dirt cheap, glacially slow shipping method), so the seller had to have shipped the stupid garbage package at around the same time as the actual product I ordered. Other reviews mentioned the exact same thing ("They sent me garbage, but I got the thing in another package"). I've spent time thinking about what kind of fraud they're committing, because it doesn't make sense to me why they would send the garbage package with the tracking number from my order -- which screams fraud -- but then also send me the actual thing I ordered. They're sending two packages to the same address, but it doesn't make sense why, since they're obviously not committing the most straightforward kind of fraud ("We shipped the item, you can see the tracking number", which incidentally, only works on eBay and not Amazon).
- baybal2 9y agoThe truth is simple, many of Amazon sellers are double or even triple dropshippers. They ordered your package from another dropshipper, and sent you a parcel with a correct tracking number to fool Amazon into thinking that the parcel was already shipped.
- sowbug 9y agoThat's a very interesting explanation! Maybe an extra twist to make it less confusing for the customer would be to include a small card in the first package saying "your package is on its way! Thanks for ordering!" Some people would still be annoyed, but it'd be the truth, and it would reduce most suspicion that you'd been sold a box of rocks.
- ggm 9y agoWell.. this story directly provides an answer (potentially) -they get an additional marginal ranking benefit inside some market appraisal score because they double their international successful completion count, for low marginal cost of posting negligible weight content to you successfully. The benefit to them is fraud, but not against you: its against the ranking engine inside some digital marketplace like alibaba. You are an unrelated third party who validates (by accepting) delivery. Since you don't know if the package is shrinkwrap "free gift" or the $20 meter, you accept. Are you willing to monty-hall reject the random package :-)
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoWhy couldn't they just say that the purchase of a multimeter includes a free gift that will be shipped independently, and then ship the multimeter with the regular tracking and the free gift later using whatever economies of scale you are proposing?
- fapjacks 9y agoYeah this is what I'm wondering too.
- pyoung 9y agoSo if I understand this right, they are creating a fake account on some other site (aliexpress, etc...) with his address attached. And then they ship the 'gift' from the Amazon tracking number, so that he is more likely to accept that package, and then ship the multimeter from the fake account tracking number, allowing them to leave themselves a positive review on that site. I always suspected something was going on with the aliexpress ratings. If you look at the reviews it is a lot of one liners like 'i got the item as described!' with a 5 star rating.
- leggomylibro 9y agoThis is the most convoluted thing I've had to think through in awhile. Jeez. Honestly, I mostly ignore reviews on Chinese listing sites unless they're low. It's all about two things: 1. Is the price in line with other listings? From both directions? 2. How many people have ordered it in the past 90 days? Sometimes that does mean taking a risk with specialty items, or foregoing them. But hey, if it's a critical application I'm not going to source it from sketchy international cheap-o listings.
- dahx4Eev 9y agoIt could be more cost effective when the packages are shipped separately. The seller can process the gift packages in batch. It's more flexible when they decide not to ship with a gift. And, there's a weight limit for sending a small parcel.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoWhy couldn't they just say that the purchase of a multimeter includes a free gift that will be shipped independently, and then ship the multimeter with the regular tracking and the free gift later using whatever economies of scale you are proposing?
- roel_v 9y agoBecause that makes your marketing message confusing to the buyer. It seems to me that Asian sellers think it's highly valuable to include a 'free gift'. I've gotten many worthless 'free gifts' (in the same package as the order of the actual product (off AliExpress); so there's no advantage like described in the OP). So I conclude that this whole 'free gift' thing really works with their domestic customers, and many sellers are not sophisticated/specialized enough to realize that for Western buyers, they don't gain anything. Under that world view, a) there is no reason to include the 'separate shipping' thing; and b) adding it makes your ad copy look complicated, to the point of discouraging a sale. If you say 'free xxx with every purchase!', that looks like a good thing. But if you have to add qualifications to it (and I don't mean legally required fine print that you don't actually want customers to read, I mean something you want the customer to internalize), it becomes a bad thing that confuses your marketing message. Just my arm-chair speculation - I've wondered about this and similar issues numerous times over the last years though. So many things seem to illogical in that world, yet they must make someone somewhere money somehow.
- always_good 9y agoPlausibly deniable way to brush. Book two orders per customer that looks like an accident.
- geomark 9y agoCould it be that the dim weight of the combined order + free gift bumps up the shipping cost? Because I know that I have ordered items from China that have free shipping unless I have more than 4 or 5 items in the same order, then the shipping goes from free to an unattactive amount. Sellers have told me to instead place multiple orders for smaller quantity and then the shipping on each is free.
- khedoros1 9y agoThat sounds like a way to give you an incentive to make more orders and boost their ratings.
- pyoung 9y agoHa, yeah that is weird. Random thought: Maybe to help prevent package theft? It usually takes about a month for shipping, so I imagine a lot of people forget about their order. By sending the throw away package first, the recipient is 'primed' and is more likely to be on the lookout for the real thing, as opposed to letting it sit on their doorstep for a day or two where it can be stolen.
- arglebarnacle 9y agoSeems like it's having the opposite effect though--the throwaway is causing people to think they've been scammed and makes them no longer on the lookout for the real package.
- daveFNbuck 9y agoThis only works if the first package isn't stolen.
- dizzystar 9y agoIt's possible their multichannel logistics is easier to handle with a blanket policy. Amazon does penalize you for not shipping on time, but it's not quite the same as eBay. While eBay lowers your tank, Amazon closes your listing, and possibly your entire store.
- Scoundreller 9y ago> via epacket, the subsidized, dirt cheap, glacially slow shipping method ePacket is actually one of the faster postal service options from China
- fapjacks 9y agoI totally believe it. I don't ship anything from China specifically anything else but epacket, but I do know that elsewhere in southeast Asia, it's either DHL or eons of waiting.
- randyrand 9y agoI got one of these for the first time about ~1yr ago.
- trumpRektYou 9y agoAlibaba was a huge "research chemical" market at one point. I'm sure there's still a ton on there.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 9y agoTitle makes it sound like people are getting shipped drugs and at risk of getting into trouble, not basically empty envelopes.
- minxomat 9y agoThe mention of empty boxes reminds me of One Point O (2004)...
- codewritinfool 9y agoThis is happening to a coworker but the packages are from Amazon. The stuff inside is mostly junk.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoIf its from amazon in the USA to a USA address, it is illegal and easily reported.
- anonymous5133 9y agoEasily reported but not easily verified. There are many cases of people getting shipped drugs and then having the police called on them once the package arrives. It could happen to anyone really. It is also fairly common that people ship drugs to anti-drug politicians.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> It is also fairly common that people ship drugs to anti-drug politicians Source?
- drawkbox 9y agoI wonder why we have the USPS Chinese subsidy? [1] Seems this makes the shipping fraud too easy as it is low cost. It was a small epacket -- a special subsidized shipping option that the USPS offers Chinese merchants, effectively enabling them to ship a parcel from China to the U.S. for less than it costs to send that same parcel domestically Due to the unbalanced pricing policies of the United Postal Union and subsidies from the U.S. Postal Service, it costs people in China virtually nothing to ship small packages to the U.S. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/11/05/how-the-usps-epacket-gives-postal-subsidies-to-chinese-e-commerce-merchants-to-ship-to-the-usa-cheap/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/11/05/how-the-...
- pravda 9y agoI think a better solution would be to lower the outrageous prices charged by the USPS to us. If you want to send a 1oz 'package' to, for example, France, it will cost $13.50. It used to cost closer to $3.40, and then they doubled it overnight to $7, and now it is freakishly high. Why is this? Because the USPS has a monopoly and is allowed to rob us!
- yequalsx 9y agoThe Postal Service can’t just raise prices as it sees fit. It needs approval from the Postal Regulatory Commission. Also they’ve had to pre-pay something like 30 years of retiree health benefits. You can send packages to France without using the USPS.
- robbiemitchell 9y agoYou can’t use Fedex or UPS or DHL?
- ac29 9y agoInternational shipment of small parcels is very expensive via those carriers. Probably on the order of $50-100 for a small box.
- sowbug 9y agoThis must be why I got a flurry of empty envelopes from China a couple months ago. A+++++ would throw out again.
- theossuary 9y agoI find it funny the article implies this only happens across international borders, and would otherwise be policed and stopped if it only happened within the US. I receive unwanted junk mail daily and it isn't even addressed to me, but to 'Current Resident'. The real solution is to allow residents to whitelist or blacklist mail. Or better yet tie mail to people and organizations, not places, and allow people to route whatever mail wherever they want.
- khedoros1 9y agoAds are different than Chinese "brushing" packages. Brushing is apparently a crime. Sending you ads isn't.
- leggomylibro 9y agoThere's a pretty sizable distinction between 'legal/illegal' and 'right/wrong'.
- khedoros1 9y agoOf course there is, but I don't consider unsolicited advertising inherently immoral, while I would consider fraudulently gaining a business advantage dishonest and immoral.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- evincarofautumn 9y agoI don’t know if this’d work at all, but I’ve idly considered the possibility of starting a grassroots “return to sender” campaign for junk mail. As it is, the postal service is paid to deliver all of that spam—but maybe it would no longer be cost-effective if everyone just said “nope, send it back” whenever possible. As it is, I just recycle all of it, but it still probably represents a sizable environmental impact in terms of materials, printing, delivery, recycling, and landfills, which we could entirely do away with.
- WalterBright 9y agoIt's the free shipping subsidy that's the underlying cause. It's the same reason we all receive enormous amounts of email spam (for me it's a couple hundred per day) - the cost of sending email is zero. I bet the email spam problem could be solved at a stroke if senders were charged $.01 per email.
- AckSyn 9y agoNo. It would be solved if people could run a whitelist that was directly tied to your address book, and any address you sent email TO would automatically be added to this address book/whitelist. I wish mail could operate on a similar method
- WalterBright 9y agoThunderbird mail does that.
- AckSyn 9y agoI'm talking about being directly at the server level. Not client.
- jlgaddis 9y agoYour comment reminded me of https://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html https://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html (cf. "e-postage").
- jlgaddis 9y ago@AckSyn: your comment is dead, but many spam filtering applications can do this, including the popular open-source ones.
- ared38 9y agoDumb question: Why are the vendors bothering to send anything?
- nerdponx 9y agoSo Alibaba doesn't figure out that it's fraud, probably.
- captaindiego 9y agoExactly. Often the shipping weight will be measured as it is shipped (likely because most of these are coming by air). Alibaba and others pass this shipping information on to the customer and would likely notice overly low shipping weights. Fraudulent sellers will also use a similar method in certain countries where the delivery address is not tracked but weight and delivery status are. They can send a nonsense package to the right country/state, have it appear in China post tracking as delivered, but the fake package was actually went to a random address with a roughly expected weight. If customers try to file claims on sites like aliexpress they'll likely rule in the favor of the seller unless you can somehow get your local post office to provide proof it was never delivered to your specific address.
- dchichkov 9y agoInteresting. As per Washington Post in 2014 USPS was losing about $1 per every package shipped as ePacket from China. These spam shipments effectively are harming USPS. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/12/the-postal-service-is-losing-millions-a-year-to-help-you-buy-cheap-stuff-from-china/?utm_term=.b5be91c00d80 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/12/...
- rahimnathwani 9y agoYou mean 'as per an internal report compiled by USPS, quoted in the Washington post'.
- ksk 9y agoWell shouldn't a newspaper standby their reporting?
- rahimnathwani 9y agoWhen a newspaper prints '{statement}, according to {source}' there's a reason: they don't independently verify those facts. They're printing it in the hope that it's useful, and giving you their source as a cop out or, if you're being charitable, so that you can decide whether you want to believe it or not. The statement "In 2012, USPS was paid only 94 cents on average for each piece of Chinese ePacket mail, according to a February report from the Postal Service’s inspector general’s office." is probably 100% accurate, in the same sense that "Rahim is the best dad ever, according to his son" is true, could be 100% accurate. You could stand by either statement. And both could be accurate. But it doesn't mean they're not misleading (in that the fact being discussed might not be true). If you look for it, you'll see similar patterns scattered all over newspapers. One of the most common examples: '{company} reported 4th quarter earnings of {amount}'. There's a reason they don't simply say ''{company} earned {amount} in Q4'.
- JorgeGT 9y agoIt is not only happening in the US, my SO in Spain received these a few months ago - unsolicited envelopes from China containing a single hair tie each (and once very cheap-looking sunglasses).
- curtisblaine 9y agoWait, can't we do the same? I mean, make money exploiting legal loopholes at the cost of Chinese people and government? After all, the borders work two ways.
- tyingq 9y agoWe don't get the dirt cheap UPU subsidized shipping rates the opposite direction. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439532/us-postal-service-subsidizes-china-other-countries-it-shouldnt http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439532/us-postal-servi...
- sverhagen 9y agoWait, what? Are we upset with China then? So that we want to target innocent Chinese people? As the article clearly states: it's illegal in China too. Is disrespecting the personal mailing address of a random, innocent Chinese person less valuable than the personal mailing address of a random, innocent American? Unless you have personal mailing addresses lying around of the specific people who are brushing the system from China now? But then... while the article talks about stuff being sent from China, I didn't get the idea that it necessarily had to be (exclusively) Chinese people who did it?
- curtisblaine 9y agoNo, I was just wondering if these border loopholes were one-way or could be played from West to East, too.
- Shivetya 9y agoThe epacket mailing is very common on low cost items you can find on ebay. I have seen it on items costing pennies and actually have won such an auction for less than a dollar and received what was listed. Now apparently the ebay buying has been safe for me and those I know who also have bought epacket delivered items, now they don't come fast but they all have arrived. so which retailers are they skimming for addresses?
- zeep 9y agoat least, they don't use USPS to deliver bio weapons yet...