California Woman Experienced Unknown Package Terror for a Year

Liputan6.com, Jakarta A woman in San Jose, California, USA, had to deal with an unusual situation for over a year. Her house was flooded with hundreds of large packages from Amazon that she had never ordered.

The woman, who is only referred to as Kay, said the packages arrived almost every day, forcing her to pile them up in her yard.

Her front yard is now so full of chest-high boxes that she has trouble parking her car.

"It's like another hell," Kay was quoted as saying by the New York Post, Wednesday (July 9).

The cause of this chaos is an Amazon seller from China named Liusandedian. This seller offers synthetic leather car seat covers that are only suitable for certain models.

As a result, hundreds of customers returned the products. However, instead of returning to the seller's address in China, the items were delivered to Kay's home.

At first, Kay thought there was only one misdirected package. However, within a few weeks, similar shipments continued to arrive. Week after week passed into months until finally it was more than a year.

"What you see now is just a small part. I've rejected more submissions than you see here," he says.

The situation even made it difficult for Kay to bring her 88-year-old mother into the house. She had to first remove a pile of boxes that blocked the driveway.

Kay claims to have filed at least six complaints with Amazon, to no avail.

"Every time I thought it would stop. They say, you won't receive these packages anymore. We will contact you in 24, 48 hours," she said.

Amazon had offered a gift card worth 100 US dollars (around Rp 1.6 million) as a form of compensation. However, Kay said the company asked her to dispose of the packages herself or donate them.

"Why am I responsible for throwing this away, when it's your seller who broke the rules?" Kay said, referring to Amazon's policy that requires international sellers to list a return address in the US.

And either provide buyers with a prepaid shipping label, or issue a refund without requiring the item to be shipped back.

If the seller does not fulfill that obligation within two days, Amazon should have the right to refund the buyer and charge the seller. However, Liusandedian allegedly avoided this by listing Kay's home address as the return address.

Amazon denied ever asking Kay to handle this problem alone. On Wednesday (July 9), the company finally sent a team to clear all packages from Kay's home and promised to resolve the issue permanently.

"We thank the media for helping bring this issue to our attention. We have apologized to the customer in question and are working directly with her to retrieve the packages, while taking steps for a long-term resolution," said Amazon's official statement.