The scammers are placing orders with and drop-shipping from a 3rd company.
Ever wonder why UC?
Thanks. I wasn’t understanding that. They are leveraging the legitimacy of a real company who happens to sell cheap items that the scammers can exploit for this purpose.
How is that racist or xenophobic? I couldn’t think of another explanation, though that doesn’t mean there isn’t one…only that when I was looking at the various options that one seemed the only plausible one. The scam one is compelling but to me there are too many holes.
As to the last, you don’t seem to understand the distinction between my hate for the CCP and China. You seem to be saying I’m a racist xenophobe because I hate the GOVERNMENT of China, and that this means I hate all Chinese…or something like that. The fact that I see the CCP as poisonous and a direct threat to the US, and therefore I see something like this in that light is certainly something you should take into account when reading my posts, as it’s a bias. But to claim this makes me a racist xenophobe is ridiculous. In addition, I was pretty subdued in THIS thread, merely saying that, to me, I didn’t see a better explanation, but that it could be a something else…I just didn’t see it.
[Moderating]
OK, that’s enough about xenophobia. If you have a problem with another poster, take it to the Pit. Discussion of the possibility that this is, in fact, a nefarious plot is germane to this thread; discussion of posters’ motives for holding various opinions on that possibility is not. Let’s not have any further discussion on that topic, on either side.
[Not moderating]
What makes planting these seeds even more a bad idea is that there’s no benefit to it. If you want to plant something in your garden, there are plenty of sources of cheap, reliable, identified and known-safe seeds. Why bother with something you don’t know about?
Curiosity?
That maybe more rooted in human psychology than I will ever know.
Like I said before, I belong to a gardening group and there’s almost everyday that a poster posts a image of some plant they can’t identify but remember growing it from seed. There are gardeners dedicated to growing from seed when commercially grafted plants are available.
Some people will travel to exotic places and bring back seeds and plant them. Some would plant seeds stored for decades by their grandma (yes some seeds survive that long). And gardeners hold “seed exchanges” where people will germinate and grow seeds in trust alone.
End goal is to create fear and loathing towards China
Someone has to be spending quite a bit of money to do this. Between labor to stuff the envelopes and the cost of the supplies plus postage from China.
Doesn’t make any sense to me at all.
They’re being drop-shipped from companies who do this for pennies. We’ve had threads on how Chinese companies can afford to sell and ship doodads for a dollar or under. But yeah, sending out so many of these is baffling.
Do any of them resemble these?
Bumping this old thread because The Atlantic just ran a long article looking into the mystery seed deliveries.
Possibly paywalled (and long), but the gist of the story is that the writer, after much research and discussions with people who received the seeds, came to a surprising conclusion: In many, if not most cases, the recipients had actually ordered the seeds earlier, but the shipments were delayed, and by the time they received them they had forgotten they had ordered them. A couple paragraphs from near the end of the article:
A researcher and I spent a month tracking down more seed recipients, trying to find someone whose experience punctured the forgotten-orders theory. Looking for signs of brushing, we tried to investigate as wide a range of packages as possible whose recipients believed that the seeds had arrived unsolicited. Not every package’s story fit the same pattern. Sometimes the evidence suggested that the seeds had spent months in transit. Sometimes the seeds received didn’t seem to match those that had been ordered. A few didn’t even come from China, but from nearby countries, such as Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. A few appeared to be connected with other e-commerce platforms, though as hard as we looked for these, the lion’s share of what we found was associated with Amazon.
We couldn’t always come to a definitive conclusion. Some of the people we contacted either didn’t have or didn’t want to share the packaging or records required to understand the seeds’ history. But, again and again, people who started out confident about what had happened to them, many of whom were bemused by our requests to search through their old orders, would invariably find something. (Even Sue Westerdale, the “Veg gardening UK” Facebook poster who had first raised the alarm, and who was initially quite dismissive when contacted about this possible narrative, eventually unearthed an April order for “colorful flower meadow seeds,” its shipping date delayed until June.) In fact, in every single case that we were able to research fully, we found a convincing connection between a mystery package and an earlier order.
Not definitive, and still allows the possibility that some of these were part of brushing scams, but at least a large number of the “mystery” seeds do seem to be forgotten orders placed months earlier by the recipients. The writer also makes the point that there was a huge surge in seed orders at the beginning of COVID shutdowns, as people turned to gardening as one way of passing the time. That and China’s own COVID restrictions caused lots of the seed orders to be delayed. And then apparently forgotten.
Interesting.
And I suspect a lot of the new gardeners had no idea, due to their inexperience, how to tell a reliable seed source from a dubious one; or of the multiple reasons why they shouldn’t order seed from random sellers with no idea of where it was coming from.
I meant to mention that another reason people didn’t realize these were seeds that they had ordered was that they had no idea they would be coming from China. Also, the packages were typically, and suspiciously, labeled on the outside as jewelry of some kind, which was likely a dodge to get by import restrictions.
Which implies that the seed could very likely be carrying diseases or pests, and wouldn’t have passed inspections.
That’s one of the issues novice gardeners might well not be aware of.
A key element missing from the Atlantic story is just how many orders they checked on in order to conclude that all 20,000 or more mystery seed packets were from actual though forgotten seed orders.
I am not buying that all the recipients involved simply forgot they had ordered seeds.
And what to make of the mislabeling of packaging as jewelry or wire connectors and the fact that seeds were evidently not of the kind requested in the cases where people had ordered seeds?
At the very least, we have evidence that Chinese sellers mislabeled seed packages to dodge USDA oversight and defrauded customers.
I find that part easy to believe, seeing the many online ads (on eBay for instance) where Chinese sellers offer seed of photoshopped plants that do not exist. It’s a commonplace scam that also involves sellers from elsewhere in southeast Asia, Russia and former Soviet states.
The idea of a nefarious plot to introduce plant diseases and invasive species into the U.S. was silly. The existence of one or more scams makes much more sense.
I got one and all of my seed orders were accounted for.
I doubt it was a plot; but it’s something that can easily happen through accidental carelessness.
I think the author of the story would like to hear from people who can document receiving seeds they didn’t order.