I keep getting packages in the mail that are addressed to me, but not things I ordered. Lawnmower parts, plumbing hardware, a grill cover, a magnetron (!), etc.

One had an amazon slip in it, but most of them have come through ebay. I reported the one to amazon and the rest to ebay (I gave them the USPS tracking numbers since I didn't know the order numbers), and also contacted a couple of the sellers who were businesses with public contact info. The sellers I reached both said they would send me return labels, but neither has yet.

I feel like this has to be a scam, but I'm not sure exactly what the scam is. Maybe someone's writing fake reviews, but making real orders to match?

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burningChrome 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

On ebay people will create fake purchases in order to get a 100% rating and then scam people since people are being far more judicial about who they're buying from.

Just a recent example I had.

I was looking for a new camera. Finally settled in on a Fuji X-T3. The prices on legit camera places like B&H, Andorama and MPB were running around $800 for an excellent condition body. It went down from there in price. Found a body on ebay for $790. Right price, albeit a bit less and for a silver body. There has been an increase in demand for the silver body since Fuji announced they will no longer make them. Most silver bodies have been pushed up over $800 for even a decent condition body.

After kind of going back and forth over whether I wanted to make the purchase, the seller messaged me with an offer of $750. I was leaning on purchasing, but just as an experiment, I sent Claude the link to the auction and asked if it saw any red flags.

Claude pointed out it was a fairly new account within the last few months. Yes, it had 100% seller rating, but they only had six sales with zero user feedback. They also were not accepting returns. For a $700+ purchase, this was too many red flags and I ended up getting something off of MPB instead.

I believe this is the scam. Set up two accounts. Sell one account to another account with a fake user and address. In this case, your address. Ship useless stuff to fake account, boost your rating in order to ease people's anxiety over ordering from someone with less than 100% seller rating. If the person getting the useless junk emails you, say you'll send a return label, then never do it.

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whaleofatw2022 4 hours ago | parent [-]

As a "photography is a cheaper hobby than a boat person" I am semi-shocked you even considered it for only about 6ish percent off...

Even Amazon sellers where there is a better return policy will happily try to pass nonfunctional stuff as working and hope nobody notices till after the return period.

(And that, actually happened on a 500$ used a6000. Looked like it worked gr8 till you tried to take a picture)

	▲	keyringlight 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Many sellers will cut whatever corners they can to get a lower price point, as that's what purchasers look for. The one that stands out to me is shipping, sure go for for cheap shipping on a trivial cost item, but I question doing the same when you're buying something expensive and not consider spending some proportion of the price on a better courier/service tier to have more certainty the item will get to you and in good condition, assuming the seller doesn't bake-in the cost of upgraded courier.

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ribosometronome 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That does sound like brushing, https://www.uspis.gov/news/scam-article/brushing-scam, which is effectively what you describe: >Maybe someone's writing fake reviews, but making real orders to match

	▲	nfriedly 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Man, that seems wasteful. I opened all of the packages already, so it's too late to send them back. (I get enough things in the mail that I did order, that I pretty much have to open it to know it's something I didn't order.)

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cm11 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I hadn’t heard of brushing, but you might also be a bystander for a different common eBay scam. Seller sells to Buyer, but ships something different to another address with the same zip code. I think eBay may have since fixed part of this, but the deal was that all the tracking info would show that the seller shipped and delivered something of the right approximate weight to the buyer (because USPS would only share/confirm info accurate to zip code level).

The thing that makes it less likely is that the buyer and seller had multiple transactions together which is uncommon for eBay. And also if the stuff you got was expensive. Maybe buyer really just put the wrong address and neither side can do much to get the item back once delivered?

	▲	ryandrake 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I got hit with that exact scam recently as a buyer, and I can tell you eBay has not figured out how to mitigate it yet. I purchased an expensive item from the seller. He sent some token thing to a different address in my city in the same zip code and provided me (and eBay) the tracking info. Item was delivered, and all eBay knows is "item sent to zip code X was delivered" so it was marked as delivered. I submitted a dispute, which was pretty much instantly closed with "Seller provided proof of delivery." I contacted UPS who happily provided me the actual address the package was delivered to. I escalated through eBay's support channel and offered to prove that the delivery was not to my address but they didn't care or want to know the actual delivery address. Finally, after a few days, eBay got back to me with a form letter saying I would be refunded because the seller's item was "lost in the mail," which was total bullshit, but at this point I didn't care since I got my money back, but the scammer probably kept the money too, so I guess eBay is eating these costs.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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astura 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>I feel like this has to be a scam, but I'm not sure exactly what the scam is

This is called a brushing scam.

https://www.uspis.gov/news/scam-article/brushing-scam

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tsss 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Man, I'd like to get a magnetron for free.

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nfriedly 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Send me a shipping label. (I'm only half-joking. I told the original seller I'd send it back to them, so I feel like I ought to give them at least a week or two to get me the label they said they'd send. But, seriously, email me in a month, and if I still haven't heard back from the seller, I'll send it to you.)

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rootusrootus 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Out of curiosity, based on a comment I read on HN the other day, I fed your profile notes into Claude and asked it to tell me your email address. It had no problem. I guess the days of obfuscating email addresses that way to foil scrapers is behind us.

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nfriedly 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, but it takes a heck of a lot more compute to to run an llm than a regex. So I think there's still some value in obfuscation.

	▲	rootusrootus 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That is a fair observation, especially since my default Claude model is Opus 4.6, which is about as far away from efficient as you can get. I don't have any recent models downloaded on my MBP, but maybe this evening I'll try it again and see how that goes -- especially the smaller lightweight models.