A California woman has received hundreds of huge Amazon packages she didn’t order after a cheap Chinese seller listed her San Jose home as its return address.
The woman — identified only as Kay — has been receiving the parcels for over a year now, and they’ve been arriving at such speed, she’s had no choice but to stack them up in her driveway to maintain some semblance of order.
The boxes are piled chest high in her yard, and have become so numerous she can no longer park her car there.
“It’s just been another form of hell,” Kay told ABC 7.
The culprit is a China-based Amazon seller called Liusandedian, which peddles faux leather car seat covers that apparently fit few of the models they’re designed for — so customers by the hundreds have been sending the junk products back.
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But the unwanted seat covers haven’t been going back to wherever Liusandedian is in China — they’ve been going to Kay’s California driveway.
It started as just one package that Kay thought was a wrong delivery, but more boxes kept arriving over the following weeks. Weeks turned into months — which became over a year — with more and more parcels showing up at her steps until Kay’s stoop was buried in boxes.
“What you see now is a fraction, because I have refused delivery on more packages than you see here,” she said.
The package pandemonium has become such a problem that sometimes when she comes home, she can’t get her 88-year-old mother to the front door without first parting the sea of boxes blocking the entryway.
And Amazon offered her next to no help for months — with at least six different complaint tickets being filed to no avail, she said.
“Every time I was absolutely assured this will stop,” she told ABC 7. “‘You won’t get any more of these packages, you’ll hear from us in 24, 48 hours.”
The business once tried offering her a $100 gift card for her trouble — but she also claims they told her it was her job to get rid of the packages and suggested she donate them or ship them back to the sender.
“Why is it my responsibility to get rid of this, when your seller is not following your rules, Amazon?” she said, referring to a Liusandedian’s apparent violation of Amazon’s policies.
International sellers are required to either list a US address for returns, give buyers a pre-paid shipping label, or issue refunds without requiring anything be mailed back. If they fail to do so within two days of a return request, Amazon is allowed to refund the buyer and bill the seller.
Liusandedian — which, outside of its Amazon listings, is a ghost online — appears to have skirted around those rules by including a bogus address that turned out to be Kay’s address.
