I’ve received a couple of packages via UPS that were addressed to a house down the street. I carried it there.
Another time, I received a FedEx notice informing me I hadn’t been home when they came to pick up something from me to ship. It also had the wrong address. Note that my address is clearly marked on my house and the curb. I called, and they apologized.
I’m an author, and I have to say that an unexplained delivery of a robot (the Roomba), computer equipment (the smartphone thing) and climate control equipment (the dehumidifier) would send me straight to my computer to write science fiction.
A couple of years ago, several very large boxes appeared on my front porch. The shipping label did have my street on it, but the number and name were unclear, and for whatever reason, they were delivered to me.
I opened them, hoping to find an invoice or something, but no luck. So I started studying the shipping labels, and I found a series of letters that could have been a name. And here’s where I went all Sherlock!
I have a link to the state’s property appraiser’s website. I did a search on my street and looked at all the names listed. There was one that had a series of letters that matched those on the label. Eureka!!! The address was 4 houses down from us.
So I scribble a note explaining why the boxes were open and hauled them to the correct address. There happened to be several other large boxes on their porch, so I was pretty sure I got the right place. I never did hear anything from these neighbors so either I guessed right and they didn’t think it was necessary to thank me, or I guessed wrong and they were celebrating their bonanza. Either way, I was pretty proud of myself.
Good job, both of you! Yes, this could be the beginning of a science fiction story. You have my full permission to use it!
About once a month or so I get mail that is addressed to one of my neighbors, so I just carry it over there. (I have such an old house, that the mailman actually puts the letters through a slot INTO the house. Hehe.) But I’ve never gotten a box addressed to someone else.
And anyway, this box was addressed to me and even had my correct phone number on the label. Whoever sent it had access to my amazon account. Just glad they used their powers for good, not evil.
I have a feeling that you have found yourself off the edge of the bell curve. For every million orders Amazon probably has about 6 errors of this nature.
What kind of stupid scam would that be? You pay to send it to your neighbor and hope to steal it back before they get home? Amazon don’t do COD, far as I know, so you can’t order stuff without making payments at time of order checkout.
If not just a mistake, maybe OP just has a secret santy.
The closest I have came to getting free stuff like this was about a decade ago: Marlboro was giving away digital cameras if you logged in with a code. I logged in, gave up my precious email addy (back before I had unlimited addies) and my home address. And promptly forgot about it.
Some weeks later I received a 3mb digital camera and a charger/usb cord.
And for the next week I got another one in the mail.
I gave the extras to my kids, my nieces and nephews and my hubby even took one to work for his international skype calls.
I still have one in my desk drawer. Whether it works and whether it uses a nowadays USB cord… no idea. But it brings back fond memories of when 300X400 pixels was all I could see on my webTV. I still have some pix from back then on my website and they are so tiny.
You steal a credit card, buy stuff on Amazon, and have it sent to a home you suspect is empty during the day. Drive by, pick up your haul off the porch, and the police can’t track it to you via either the stolen credit card or the delivery address.
I once got a mysterious package delivered to my porch. I order stuff a lot (it’s been years since I’ve been in a mall) so I take it in and open it.
It’s full of sex toys…
I look at the receipt and it’s for the married couple across the street. It’s addressed on the outside to them with the correct address. The UPS driver had just put it on the wrong porch (house numbers are similar).
I taped it up, then waited until they were out for the evening and redelivered it.
I could never look them in the eye if they knew that i knew…well you know…
So glad to see this thread. Very informative. Maybe someone has a clue on this mystery.
Last year my daughter received an Amazon gift card in the mail. Padded mailer with her correct name and address. Return address was Amazon fulfillment center. Inside was a gift receipt to my daughter from Pamela J. Askew. Receipt looks exactly like all the others we’ve received from Amazon.
The card code did not work (darn it). I called Amazon CS and they had no record of anything associated with any of the information I could give them.
If you’re stealing credit cards, you’re past the simple scam stage, and likely have more nefarious things to do with it than order Amazon at your neighbors address.
Well, I thought this thread was interesting when I read it the first time, but now it’s happened to me!
I think I was ‘gifted’ by an employee as well. I received a package I was expecting, curtains if you must know, and there was a little white box in there as well. Which was weird, because I was not expecting any little white boxes. Well, that box contained a decent piece of electronic equipment.
Looking around, it doesn’t appear there’s anything to do with it and I’m legally entitled to keep it.
Most of the college kids are on their way out the door over the next week to ten days. Like I said upthread, we can almost plan and time the best/most common times for this to happen.
A friend recently ordered something or other from Amazon. A while later he received a notice from Amazon that the carrier had reported the package as lost, and they refunded his money. Several days later, the item arrived.
Not that I work at a USPS data processing center or anything because I certainly wouldn’t divulge any trade secrets, but the USPS and Amazon share package-handling tasks (Amazon is traditionally more willing to work on Sunday, for example, but the USPS is much better equipped to handle envelopes). There exists the possibility that the incredibly complex, huge, and badly-overstressed application that keeps track of every piece of mail or package in existence (where it came from, where it’s going, when it’s going to be there, how much it costs) might have skipped a bit somewhere and said “You know what? Fuck it, I don’t remember a damn thing about this box. It’s going to ThelmaLou. NEXT.”
Not likely without some human intervention or error somewhere along the line. Our contract with the USPS specifies just how and how closely things are tracked because we pay them based on that tracking. Perfectly handled and the package costs us less than a buck - not scanned to the pallet and it becomes 5 bucks - wrong pallet and it becomes $25. So one place where we have state-of-the-art software is in the tracking side. And I am told the USPS is even better.
Once the box has been filled at the FC it is assigned both an AM and USPS tracking code. That code is scanned as it leaves the FC and is loaded on a truck. It, along with all the other contents of the truck, are transferred to the SC system/tracking when it arrives at “our” building to be abused by us (I may post the link to the thread where I describe that abuse below). It then comes down a lane/line to me or one of my coworkers who scan it to a package already on that particular POs pallet to double-check that we’re putting it in the right place. From there we load it onto a truck to the USPS and the computers transfer it along with the rest of the manifest for that pallet to the USPS system. What they tell you is less than what they know; the Higher Ups TPTB can actually track a package as it passes from place to place within our building. At that level, no-one can get inside or generate any type of label or direction/code other than Problem Solve (damaged boxes) and those areas have so damn many cameras on them and just 2-3 workers and always the same ones that the chances they could pull off any gifting is virtually nil. So gifting happens at the FC level or it just doesn’t happen.
Somehow (I mentioned never ordering TVs or sensitive larger electronics from Amazon) we drifted from the thread lightly and I described the SC process in more details than I normally do.
And note that even though I don’t really reveal anything you couldn’t find with a good Google-fu, if TPTB ever find these posts and decide to track me down I am fired. Period. We have people fired for posting on our internal Facebook group weekly; one of the reasons I don’t do Facebook. It can be a terrific job most days but as I tell new hires -------- there is a reason we’re named after a jungle. You can get eaten alive without even trying hard.
