Boxes outside Holton’s house in San Jose, Calif. Holton said the boxes that arrived at her house were returns of car seat covers sold on Amazon by an independent seller called Liusandedian. — KAREN HOLTON via The New York Times
About a year ago, a single package appeared on Karen Holton’s porch in San Jose, California. She was bewildered; she had not ordered anything, and neither had her neighbours. So she dropped the package at UPS, and thought that was the end of it.
She was wrong.
“They kept coming,” Holton, 55, said in an interview.
It was just the beginning of a yearlong ordeal as the unintended recipient of misdirected Amazon returns.
Over months, an onslaught of cartons and boxes grew at the doorstep of Holton’s home, a single-family house on a corner lot, in stacks so high that she was unable to easily use her door or get to her mail.
“They were always put on my porch, or if the porch was too full, they would pile up outside,” she said. “It was hit and miss. A couple of weeks there were none. And then 10 in a week. No rhyme or reason to it.
“I had to move them if I wanted to be able to use my porch or get into my house,” she said.
Eventually, she started to move them to the carport, and covered the boxes with a tarp, worried about rain, fire and rodents. The chaotic stacks of mismatched packages grew into musty walls so tall that she was unable to park there.
Occasionally, she opened a few, and pulled out what she described as “cheap” fake leather car seat covers.
At one point, she estimated that there were as many as 120 boxes sitting on her property.
Her ordeal as the recipient of e-commerce returns gone wrong was reported by ABC 7 of San Francisco, which portrayed it as a case study in how a seller based overseas – in this case an outfit called Liusandedian that sold car seat covers configured to fit various makes and models – can use any random address in the United States as the location for its returns.
The company’s online listings appeared inactive Friday. Holton did not know how her address came to be the one provided by the seller, which she said appeared to be based in China.
She tried to stop the flow.
She contacted FedEx and UPS, she said, and was told that she either had to be at the door and decline the deliveries in person, or to register her address as permanently refusing deliveries.
“Anytime I would hear a truck pull up, I would run out and make sure they were not dropping off,” she said.
She said she was able to intercept and stop the delivery of dozens of packages, estimating that hundreds were sent to her.
Holton said she contacted Amazon six times to file a complaint and was told she had to drop off the packages herself at an Amazon return location.
Amazon said in a statement Friday that it had taken steps to stop the packages from being delivered to Holton’s address, and that it would collect others that may still be in transit, should they arrive at her home.
“We’d like to thank ABC 7 On Your Side for bringing this to our attention,” an Amazon spokesperson, Sharyn Ghacham, said in the statement. “We’ve apologised to the customer and are coordinating with the seller responsible toward a permanent resolution.”
On Tuesday, a large truck that Holton described as one typically used when cars are repossessed, pulled up to her property and gathered the remaining packages from her carport and porch.
“Even the guy that came to pick them up was like, ‘What the … ?’” she said.
Holton is relieved, but wary, wondering whether this is really an end to a nightmare in which even porch pirates have been of no help.
“I was hoping somebody would steal it off my carport,” she said of the growing stack of boxes. “Even thieves didn’t want it.” – ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
