A couple of days ago I got a “Delivery scheduled” email from Fedex for a package arriving from Great American Business Products out of Houston, TX.
Didn’t immediately recognize the company name, but didn’t worry about it; I order a ton of shit online and a lot of it gets drop shipped so the place that ships it isn’t always the place I bought it from.
Fedex dropped off the package today and it’s a nice 31 gallon galvanized steel trash can. Awesome, I needed something like that for my garage.
Except…
I didn’t order it.
Pull out the packing slip and yeah, it’s got my name, my address (but with an “office” as part of the address, which I never use) and a 709 area code phone number that is not mine.
Call up Great American Business Products, it was a “web order”, they don’t have any details on the payment method (was hoping to get some credit card digits just to verify none of mine were used), but they do have the order date (4/24) and total, $19X.XX (aside, gawdang, when did trash cans get so expensive?).
Quick check of both of my “frequently used” credit cards show no corresponding amounts charged this month.
So…WTF? Did some scammer decide to test a stolen credit card by ordering from there and just randomly pulled my name and address out of a hat as a shipping address?
Is my place being staged as a “drop point” for fraudulent orders and someone is going to cruise by later to pick this up? (IP Cam will pick that up if it happens. I did leave the box outside just in case).
Or is there some other aspect of this that I’m not thinking of?
On the plus side anything left on your property is yours to keep unless the shipper contacts you and sends you a return shipping label and schedules a pick up. Usually not worth their time. I had a case of ammo delivered to a wrong address and never saw it. UPS asked me to drive around my neighborhood to look for it. House had a red door so I found the vacant house but ammo was gone. I now have my shipments go to a shipping store in town. Shipper sent me another case.
Pull your credit reports ASAP and be on the lookout for anything else suspicious, e.g., mail not getting delivered. Also, while you are at it, freeze your credit and see if your county has a title monitoring service. May sound over the top but I’ve been through a rather significant identity theft and steps like this can help make it a lot less painful.
Something similar like this happened to me a while back way before Ring cameras. I received a two high end camera flashes for the digital SLRs from a vendor and didn’t recognize it neither. I contacted the vendor they said it was online order as well and the contact number, email on file was not mine. I reported it as fraud and they said they would send me a return label and to send it back to them. A few days later while I was away my wife calls me and says UPS is here to pickup the package. I thought it was weird and told her to tell UPS we didn’t have anything to give him. The scammer was tracking the order and upon delivery they tried to send the UPS guy with a call tag (for those of you that know what that is) to pick up the order. They figure most people would have just assumed it was the vendor picking back up the order but in fact it ended up the scammer tried to have it redelivered to them. Eventually I got the real return label via email printed it up and returned them to the vendor properly.
I would hold on to it or have the vendor send a return label if they wanted it back. Don’t leave it outside. It was billed to your name and address so technically you received something that wasn’t yours to begin with.
If you are concerned about someone opening up a credit card maybe sign up for Credit Karma or whichever one your existing credit cards offer. Another thing you can do is put a lock on your credit. This way they cannot run your credit and apply for cards. The lock option is available through the three major credit bureau and they even have apps to unlock/lock on the fly.
Equifax, Experian and Trans Union all offer the same lock features for free. Its not freezing your credit but locking it down. If you need to run a credit check find out which provider they check against and just unlock it so they can pull your credit. Once it’s pulled lock it back up again.
Last year I had ordered some items through ebay that were not available locally. It was around eight orders total from about six different vendors. These vendors all used different shippers - FedEx ground, UPS and USPS. Ebay must have had some type of glitch in their system with my business address since my packages started getting returned to the senders as undeliverable or delivered to another address in the town where my business is located that had nothing to do with me - to this day I still don’t know where that was. One of the packages was delivered by FedEx ground after FedEx relabled it with my correct address. The original address had my street address with the town and zip code in South Jersey (my shop and house are in North Jersey). I put in claims with ebay that the packages were not received, which they promptly denied and closed after forwarding pictures of the items sitting in front of someone’s house. So, these items were delivered to someone in town, but not to me. I ended up having to dispute these charges with my credit card company since ebay kept saying they have proof the items were delivered - which was true, just not to me.
Around the same time all this was going on, I started getting random packages I had not ordered delivered by FedEx ground to both my business and my house that had also been relabled by FedEx ground. The original labels on packages had my name on them but also the same partial South Jersey address. Oddly, many of these had been shipped by Walmart, so where the glitch is, I’m not sure. Maybe there is a fulfillment company they both use that has issues with addresses?