Pitts: No, you really didn’t order that. A postal scam comes to Fayetteville
On Feb. 24, around noon, my wife texted me a picture of a package from The Home Depot.
The package had our address but was sent to a “jackjoe/jackjoe.”
She wrote: “This isn’t us. Did you order something from Home Depot?”
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I searched my brain.
I can say between the two of us, I am slightly or perhaps greatly more likely to have ordered something online and forgotten about it.
“Not that I know of,” I wrote back.
When I got home, the box was on the porch where my wife had left it. I nudged it with my foot and it felt light.
No ticking heard. Does anyone ever hear ticking anyway, outside of a Hollywood movie?
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I picked the box up — yes, super light — and something was rattling around on the inside. Someone had put a tiny item in a way-too-big box.
I did not open it. I called a number on the box for Home Depot, and a woman on the other end had clearly heard my story before. It was a scam, she said.
“Is it a small package?” she asked.
I answered, “It’s relatively small, yes.”
She said: “Yes, this could be a scammer who uses our customers’ addresses to send items to customers.”
Then the scammer contacts The Home Depot to say they did not receive the item, she said. They request a refund, she said.
She said the scammers use gift cards not credit cards for the original transaction.
She looked up the order number from my mystery box and revealed that inside was an adapter that cost 41 cents. She told me she would make a note in the system with the scammer’s phone number and other identifying information.
“You can just discard the item,” she added. “There is nothing we can do about it, and for the item.”
Of course, she added, I could just keep it.
Excellent. I was looking at a no-guilt freebie — months after Christmas. My mood changed from wariness and confusion to excitement.
My mind began to cycle through all the adapters for electronic devices I might need around the house, though the answer in truth is none. In the excitement, I pushed aside the logic such electronic adapters were unlikely to be just 41 cents.
Accordingly, the mystery item turned out to be a black, plastic adapter for a sprinkler. Specifically, it is an Orbit brand adapter that connects a sprinkler to an underground pipe. Talk about anticlimactic.
It also struck me that this scammer sending out little 41-cent items to multiple addresses was a very labor-intensive and inefficient way to get money.
I checked out the Google for other instances of this scam. The one I found that most closely matched mine is called “brushing,” but there were a few differences.
In brushing, a person will receive packages with “various sorts of items which were not ordered or requested,” according to a page on the brushing scam at the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) website.
It said the sender is usually an international, third-party seller who uses addresses found online. The goal is to use the recipient’s name as a verified buyer to write a fake review online.
“These fake reviews help to fraudulently boost or inflate the products’ ratings and sales numbers, which they hope results in an increase of actual sales in the long-run,” the USPIS site said. “Since the merchandise is usually cheap and low-cost to ship, the scammers perceive this as a profitable pay-off.”
I reached out to the N.C. Attorney General’s office, which sends out occasional news releases from Josh Stein alerting North Carolinians to different kinds of scams.
“We’re not aware of reports to our office about this scam,” Nazneen Ahmed, a spokesman, said in answer to my email.
She referred me to the USPIS site on brushing, as well as one maintained by the Better Business Bureau.
Ahmed encouraged me or anyone “who has been a victim of this scam” to file a complaint with their office online or 1-877-5-NO-SCAM.
She said the Attorney General’s Office will plan to put out a consumer alert on this scam, so people can be aware of what to look for.
I was happy to have put this scam on the radar of our attorney general and also to have kept it on the radar for Home Depot. I felt like “a good egg,” who had done his duty as a consumer and a citizen.
But I began to puzzle if I also felt like a victim.
Hmm. Not a whole lot. But I will definitely follow the advice I read on the Postal Inspection Service site and elsewhere to change relevant passwords and keep an eye on my accounts. The one thing I know for sure is that some bad actor got my address.
Meanwhile, out of curiosity, I went to the Home Depot website and looked up the reviews for my little sprinkler adapter: 4.4 out of 5 stars out of 36 reviews.
Not bad, honestly. Good show, Orbit.
I did not see my name listed among the reviewers, and if everything stays on the up-and-up, I won’t see it.
I don’t even own a sprinkler.
Myron B. Pitts can be reached at mpitts@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3559.
This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Pitts: No, you didn’t order that. A postal scam comes to Fayetteville
