Sadly that leaves me to believe the sellers will have to eat the cost in these cases, which leaves relatively little incentive for Amazon to improve vetting.
Maybe it's only every 25th box that has a barcode sticker.. so they've just assumed it was package theft.
I would imagine this is hard to debug as a seller.
In that case the OP should consider themselves the (un)lucky one since they several times happened upon box no25!
It may happens only every 25th box, but he specifically order that specific barcode, so it happens on every box he order.
I guess in his closest warehouse, there's less people that require theses boxes and more that require granola bar or Harry Potter coaster, thus that's always what he gets.