What the duck? Bloke keeps getting sent bathtime toys in the post – and Amazon won't say who's responsible A chap from County Durham in northeast England is suffering a very specific mallardy – one of rubber ducks sent to his home address from Amazon with alarming regularity. The Northern Echo reports that 76-year-old Peter Jackson has received a bathtime plaything "almost every day" for the better part of three weeks. Among the …
A couple of options:
1) if there were no reviews entered.
2) if they contacted the buyer who verified it's a bar bet/publicity stunt/performance art piece.
Regarding the last possibility: I went to college with a guy ("Jim") who decided it would be fun to pick a random household out of a phone book. Jim would periodically send them postcards of his travels (real and/or fictional, I don't recall). After several years of this gag, Jim developed a fatal disease, and came clean in a letter, not wanting them to be left wondering about the letter.
I probably have some details wrong... this was some time ago. I lost touch with Jim after college, and found out the above story after his death.
"I've been receiving unsolicited Lamborghinis for the last two weeks. When is it ever going to stop?"
A friend of mine really likes LawnGnomes. His birthday had been fast approaching when I hit upon a surprise. I purchased one new LG every day for a week, sent them to him with the gift card reading "Happy birthday!", and "signed" it as if it had come from Old Man Henderson.
He whined to me about it over drinks on his birthday, frustrated that he didn't know who the hell was sending them to him. He figured it out when I started laughing my ass off.
He showed me just how much trouble I was in when he pointed out the fact that each LG had come in a large box, filled half full of styro packing peanuts, the LG nestled in a styro cube, then the rest of the box filled to bursting with a final bunch of the peanuts. He had seven boxes of the stuff & nowhere to put any of it, a fact that his wife was Not Happy about.
I told her it was my fault & took the boxes of peanuts off her hands, for which I was taken off her shit list.
I poured all the peanuts into a "lawn & leaf" bag, tied it closed, & mailed it back to Amazon as a CashOnDelivery package that cost me nothing.
I'm sure they were <Sarcasm>Thrilled</Sarcasm>. =-D
There is another euphamism that is popular on this side of The Pond at least that goes "She Who Must Be Obeyed" (SWMBO). It is always capitalized, always said in sepulchre tones of ultimate doom, & is meant to indicate that failure to obey may, can, & often does result in the imminent death of the offender.
The fact that my friend's SWMBO Was Not Happy is pretty much intended to mean that someone, likely him if no other target could be found, would be shortly found strung up a tree by their scrotum & used as a speed sack punching bag.
I knew this, knew it was my fault he was Up Shit Creek, so came clean to SWMBO in order to save his bacon. I said that I hadn't known that each LG would be encased in so much of the offending peanuts, I had thought the LG would be encased in the styro cube to protect it in transit. How was I to know that Amazon would insist on further packing it in enough additional padding to insulate it from a direct tactical nuclear strike?
I appologized profusely (there may have been abject groveling & foot kissing involved, but that's a different fantasy), and SWMBO calmed Her Righteous Wrath enough to let me live.
For those of you homosexuals laughing at us straight folks, don't get too uppity. You've got a HWMBO to contend with & he's just as dangerous to your health. =-)P
...this response does not improve the situation for Amazon. The bloke's being harassed (you know, a few days or a week might have been funny, but the more time goes on, the more it must be wearing on the bloke) and here are Amazon taking the mick. Not a good look, Jeff.
There's plenty the chap could do back if he was so inclined.
Firstly just tell the delivery driver that you hadn't ordered anything from Amazon and simply refuse to accept delivery on the basis that you didn't place the order.
If they try and dump the parcel on your door, simply point out that'd be fly tipping waste. I think Amazon would quickly get fed up with their time being wasted and would do something to prevent reoccourance.
If that failed, write them a letter saying that you no longer consent to having your personal data (name & address) stored on their systems. Then, next time you get something delivered put a GDPR complaint in to the ICO. That'd at least be entertaining, since it costs nothing for you to do and it's a disproportionate amount of hassle for the company to deal with compared to stopping the 3rd party having stuff delivered to him.
Reminds me of a meeting when I worked for OR. A particularly obnoxious/self important senior manager warned that genuine NTE's (telephone front plates) were being sold on Ebay at a price that was lower than what OR was paying for them. Obvious accusation was engineers selling 'surplus stock' . Much laughter when some wag at the back suggested they buy them from Ebay as they were clearly the cheapest supplier.
"Firstly just tell the delivery driver that you hadn't ordered anything from Amazon and simply refuse to accept delivery on the basis that you didn't place the order."
Requesting a return would cause more trouble for them. I must admit I haven't tried requesting a return label and pick-up for something they delivered that I hadn't ordered but twice they've done that themselves for stuff I'd ordered and they hadn't delivered.
"Requesting a return would cause more trouble for them."
A neighbour was complaining that he recently had several items from Amazon which for various reasons he wanted to return. They did the refund - and told him that with the pandemic they didn't want the items returned. He was left wondering at what value threshold they would want something returned.
Firstly just tell the delivery driver that you hadn't ordered anything from Amazon and simply refuse to accept delivery on the basis that you didn't place the order...
That doesn't work during Covid - delivery drivers are just leaving goods on doorsteps, maybe taking a photo as proof of delivery in lieu of a signature, then ringing the doorbell and scarpering. By the time I get to the door they're already in the their van ready to go.
This is why you have to list purposes of processing. It's quite possible to have data that you're allowed to use for one purpose but not for others. I'm not quite so blasé about what's going on here. Okay, the ducks are fairly harmless and slightly amusing (is he a friend of James Veitch?), but it's fairly easier to conjure up much more sinister pranks using this method, so Amazon's response when he objected is pretty poor. Just as you used to be able to have a block put on nuisance callers they should be willing to prevent any further shipments from that purchaser.
Well, if you've told Amazon you don't consent to their processing your details and you want it removed then according to the letter of the law they are supposed to remove those details. If somebody else adds those details in without the consent of the person named then technically it is a GDPR breach as Amazon are holding details that you've told them that you have told them that you do not consent for them to hold.
At the moment if he tries to responsibly raise a complaint with Amazon it takes him a lot longer to raise the complaint than it takes Amazon to ignore the complaint. Once you've created a standard complaint to the ICO, it takes far, far, far less work for you to raise the complaint than it does for Amazon to respond to it.
Obviously it is a weak case, but that's beside the point, which is that Amazon's legal department will find it far more expedient to persuade their operations team to bring these capers to an abrupt halt than they would enjoy turning the ICO into a hostile belligerent when the ICO starts getting multiple separate and justified complaints a week.
Friendly Floatees have travelled vast distances across oceans but there have been no recent sightings.
I once received a porn supplier's graphic catalogue through the post. Whoever forged the order knew my address - and my full "formal" name that is only used on very official forms. Even the electoral roll only has initials for my middle names. In context at the time - I could guess which branch of UK officialdom had done that out of spite.
Used to get a load of junk mail about wining various foreign lotteries - which they will send to me, for a small admin fee of course. I filled in the forms, wrote across it in big letters "Please deduct your fee from my winnings" and then sent it back in the envelope "forgetting" to put a stamp on it.
Soon stopped after that!
Junk snail mail had its advantages I used to take the unsolicited credit card application from one company and stuff it in the postage paid envelope of another credit card company. I thought they would appreciate the credit offer if I did not and they were paying for it to get mailed.
Also while waiting in airports filling out the postcards that would fall out of the magazines with bogus addresses and stuffing them in the mailbox..
Ah the good old days of getting even.
I started in January this year and continued once a month through May. I would receive a package Amazon addressed to a person I never heard of to my address. I Googled my street name and could find only one other city in the U.S. with the same name. Each time I would start a chat session with Amazon, lasting anywhere from 30 minutes to 7 hours (they took their time responding after I supplied the latest requested information and just periodically check the chat session). The hardest part was getting them to understand I was not the person who made the order, nor did I know the person who made the order, where they lived, nor that the postman did not deliver to the wrong address, but the package had my address. They would not issue me a return shipment labels because I didn't place the orders. Each time they instructed me to keep, give away, or dispose of the items as I saw fit. Most of the items were worth a few dollars. I was able to use some of the items. The final person I had chatted with I think fully understood the issue and said he would elevate the issue to see if the problem was a bug in their database, procedures or just human error. I think he may have solved the problem as I haven't received any more packages.
Similar story here. Over the first 4 months of the year I have received haemorrhoid cream, scar cream, some plasters, and randomly a telescope!
I've contacted amazon to try and return them - not interested and told me to keep them.
My son enjoys the telescope, and the rest went on ebay.
My son recently moved to Hawaii for work. A few weeks after he arrived, found rental housing, and was joined by his family, an office chair showed up, addressed to him at his new address, from Amazon. A $500 office chair. Needless to say, he hadn't ordered one. Or even looked at one.
Being a responsible adult, he communicated with Amazon. As you may know, the documentation that comes with an Amazon shipment is somewhat...limited, but he did read them the tracking number...and they said it wasn't in their system, so they couldn't help him. He waited a week (because, he thought, someone is going to wonder what happened to the $500 office chair they ordered). and called Amazon again. Same answer: "not in our system"
So, at this point, he has an office chair he doesn't want, a sender who "doesn't have it in their system", and is trying to figure out how to responsibly get rid of it.
Doesn't smell like a scam to me -- he hasn't had anyone from "Amazon" trying to pick it up, no order on his or any of his family's Amazon accounts, so he's chalking it up to random incompetence on Amazon's part.
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