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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> there has been no previous contact with the company

Every law student is given that speech. There used to be a specific scam targeting new lawyers. When a new law office was setup it would be sent books and lawyer-related equipment, along with a bill for payment. The scammers hoped the bill would just be paid without further inquiry. So law students are now warned and told that they can keep such "gifts".

But that isn't how the real world works. Who here doesn't have any previous contact with amazon? What if the package contains something very illegal (drugs etc) and the police are watching it? That will be a fun afternoon. Or what if your new address, previously perhaps a vacant house, is being used by someone buying illegal stuff? Yesterday he would pick it up from the door of an empty house. Today the package is inside the house. Unrequested deliveries should not be treated lightly.

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Not sure why previous contact with a company matters?

Here's what the U.S. Federal Trade Commission says about receiving packages you didn't order [1]:

"What do you do when you receive merchandise that you didn’t order? According to the Federal Trade Commission, you don’t have to pay for it. Federal laws prohibit mailing unordered merchandise to consumers and then demanding payment."

There is obvious nuance here [2]. Maybe receiving "stolen property" for example. But if the item is addressed to you, and you didn't order it, I think you're in the clear, and certainly nobody can demand payment and enforce it.

-edit-

This reminds me of the scams in Europe where someone will grab your hand and put a bracelet on or put a flower in your hair or something and demand payment. I've been in this scenario. All you have to do is walk away or just throw the merchandise on the ground. They'll change their tune quickly.

[1] https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0181-unordered-merchan...

[2] I'm not a lawyer.

In the Pre-Covid Age that scam was pretty common in NYC, too. Usually it's someone dressed as a Buddhist monk in a tourist area like Times Square who will walk up to you and press a charm into your hand, then ask for payment. This happened to me when I first moved here years ago. I wasn't sure what was happening so I thanked him and kept walking, thinking it was some kind of religious proselytizing thing. He came after me and angrily demanded money, so I handed the charm back and left.

Here's an article from a few years ago about these fake monks being a nuisance on the High Line park: https://gothamist.com/news/the-high-line-is-struggling-with-...

My policy is to never take anything from any person on the street. Flyers, comic club tickets, CDs, cans of soda, I don't want the interaction.

It happens in every tourist city, I experienced roses in Paris, bracelets in Madrid, Donations in Berlin.

I had a similar scam happen to me in Istanbul:

A shoeshiner would walk in front of you, 'accidentally' drop their brush. As a decent human you pick it up and hand it to them.

Then the guy insists to give you a 'free' shoe shine. After he's done, he demands payment.

The first time that happened to me, the perpetrator ruined my suede shoes. (I didn't even mind losing the few dollars for the unplanned shine otherwise..) A few days later, on the second time I didn't pick up the brush.

There are different rules for people who have ongoing relationships with companies, mostly so that one party doesn't profit from an obvious mistake.

For instance, say you are a store that orders a 1/2 pallet of coke products every week. Then one week the driver leaves a full pallet by accident. Do you get that extra pallet for free? What if you forget to place the order, but the company for whatever reason sends the usual 1/2 pallet anyway? Should you have to pay for that delivery if you use it? These preexisting relationships create situations different than the mystery package on the doorstep.

You’ll have to look into it some more if you’re interested, but I expect this mostly pertains to Americans receiving mail or packages at their homes.

It may be the case that a supplier who delivers something you didn’t request (in your case here) can’t make you pay, but they’d probably terminate any relationship with you.

So I’m only really going off of what the FTC says. In a case of an existing relationship if Amazon Subscribe and Save sends me an extra unit, then no I don’t have to pay for that. It doesn’t matter if I’ve been buying from them in the past.

UCC - § 2-606. What Constitutes Acceptance of Goods.

"(1) Acceptance of goods occurs when the buyer (c) does any act inconsistent with the seller's ownership; but if such act is wrongful as against the seller it is an acceptance only if ratified by him."

UCC isn't law in every US state, but is common.

Accepted as meeting the seller's obligation under the contract[1]. It's not saying that a buyer incurs new contractual obligations simply by accepting delivery of goods that weren't part of their original contract.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/2/2-601

The false delivery is offer, making the recipiant a party to the new contract which they acc2pt by taking the goods.

Are you referring to this in an individual customer aspect? Because it seems that the FTC states quite clearly this is not the case. If a company sends you something you didn't ask for and it's addressed to you, you get to keep it as a free gift. The FTC even uses the exact language "free gift".

This may change somewhat if it is a business transaction, but I think it's quite clear if you get a package addressed to you that you didn't order, there's no contractual obligation.

As an example, if you have ever worked in retail sometimes you get truck shipments of things and there can be extra items you didn't order. Maybe the delivery driver said "hey this was sent to you". Accepting delivery of that doesn't mean you have to pay for it.

Business to business transactions have different rules than when an end consumer is involved, usually, because of the asymmetry. Businesses typically have orders of magnitude more cash than the average consumer, so forcing them to lose a few thousand dollars to get their act together is nothing, whereas it could be a disaster for a private person.

Seems like the best option is probably to accept the parcel, then notify the sending company (or authorities, as appropriate) of the problem, and if they request you return it, you can politely say no and cite the law.

I would do this, with the understanding that A) If it's illegal (drugs) or stolen goods, the police should come take it off your hands, and B) while the company in question may not be able to charge you, they might have other ways to "incentivize" you to return it.

E.g. if it's Amazon they might cancel your account and blacklist you. Depending on the value of the item (and how much use you can get out of it), it may be easier to return it than to not use Amazon if you do often, or if you use Prime and/or Prime video/music, or worst case, your name is the main one on the AWS account for your business.

I would gladly return some Google store pixel phone if it meant I didn't have to worry about my Gmail account being locked, and all the problems that would cause me (and yes, this is a good reason for me to have a different email).

I feel like Amazon customer service has been known to be pretty generous about stuff like this. They really want your future business.

I once ordered 5 stools, and they delivered 25. It wasn't a scam, it was a genuine dispatching mistake on Amazon's part. I let them know, and their response was to just keep or "dispose" of the extra stools.

(I ended up donating them to a local piano teacher.)

So many questions...

Did you order 5 piano stools? I have 2 grand pianos, a clavichord, and about 30 electronic keyboards and I still only have 3 piano seats (1 bench, 1 stool, 1 drum throne). So now I have to know what you used those 5 stools for ;)

Second... how long did it take you to find 20 piano stool recipients? And how did you get the message across? Every time I try something like that I get treated like a scam artist and lose interest in helping.

They were normal stackable circular wooden stools, not piano stools. I offered them on Facebook Marketplace and this piano teacher responded saying they needed extra seating for recitals and could use the stools. That seemed the most worthy cause I saw in the first 24 hours so I give away the 20 extra stools to that teacher.

(Incidentally, I do play piano, but the 5 stools I ordered weren't intended for piano use on my part, I was just using them for overflow seating for friend gatherings.)

Ah, thanks for solving that mystery! I can sleep now

Seems like Best Buy would be on the hook. Your address isn't the one associated with the stolen credit card but they accepted it as payment anyway. If the crook marked it as a gift, using the correct address as the payment address and your address as the shipping address, then it does get a bit murky since you were sent an unsolicited "stolen" package. Then it becomes a question of if the laptop is considered stolen or is it considered legally purchased with an illegal credit card transaction. If this was all done with stolen cash, I doubt the laptop would be considered stolen (but I'm not a lawyer so maybe it would be). With a stolen credit card it becomes a much more interesting legal question.

The unwanted bracelet/flower thing happens in South America too though usually with stickers or a small food item like gum or candy. The grifter will hand them out to an entire group and then ask for payment, at which point several people will already have eaten the food item or peeled off the sticker. If you refuse the item or return it in its original state, they usually don't hassle you about it. They rely on the gap of time between handing out the item to the first person and the last person to create an indebtedness that too small for you to make a fuss about paying.

> Seems like Best Buy would be on the hook. Your address isn't the one associated with the stolen credit card but they accepted it as payment anyway.

The funny thing about Best Buy is that they refuse to ship packages to known mail forwarders, even if my card's mailing address matches said mail forwarder.

I find it interesting that receiving unsolicited goods, it's fine to keep them but when unsolicited money appears (due to a bank error or similar), it needs to be paid back.

I guess that's because money is more fungible and doesn't spoil?

And it's also more farfetched to assume that a company would hand out free money without any explanation as swag?

This is not legal advice.

WRT receiving stolen property... typical remedy is to either simply return the item of pay for replacement value.

So, in a worst case, you could probably hold on to it for at least 2 years [1].

[1] - I am not a lawyer. Just someone who has done a lot of legal docs that had to get approved and longtime hobbyist. Anyway, 2 years is the cut off for most civil tort claims but one may want to look into and consider the statute of limitations for conversion as a criminal act.

The 'give and then ask for payment' thing is nothing new. I've had musicians attempt to do so in parking lots in the past, back when CDs were a thing people burned.

Anyway, back to original point... Previous contact could matter THEORETICALLY if it comes to acting in good faith. I.e. if you have a prior relationship with a company, and get an invoice with product and don't even ask the company WTF is up... that COULD be used against you. Would a company do so? IDK. Probably wouldn't be good for PR. Shitty analogy but even the worst Porn Billers do for fraudulent (i.e. customer legitimately paid but balked after) charge backs is typically deny the charge back and blacklist the CC and/or customer.

> Not sure why previous contact with a company matters?

That was mentioned in the article, but the article was from the BBC, so there might be some differences in laws.

I've lost my cool at them a couple times. Then you walk around feeling shitty for the next hour because they're usually poor and/or migrants and probably aren't doing it for fun.

There is another scam I've seen in Australia where companies send out invoices for domains that you own. Except it's an inflated bill from a different company than the domain is currently registered with. Very dodgy.

I've gotten those too. The letters/emails are carefully worded so the subject screams "Pending domain registration!" to make you think it's your actual domain expiring, but the small print says that the service they offer is "registering" your domain in some random "world business directory". This way it's not an outright scam, in that they do render a (completely useless) service in exchange for your money, but of course they hope that the random admin/manager who sees the "bill" won't realize the difference and will pay up.

> scams in Europe where someone will grab your hand and put a bracelet on or put a flower in your hair or something and demand payment

This used to be commonplace in the US, particularly in airports, in the 70s. It's the source of a gag in the movie Airplane (or one of those comedies). I don't know why it faded out.

Probably time, place, and manner regulations for expression in airports.

https://www.lawa.org/news-releases/2002/news-release-5

(very many U.S. airports now have free expression booths requiring a permit, and forbid some kinds of expressive conduct or solicitation elsewhere in the airport, which I think the courts are OK with)

Technically that doesn't say whether you can keep the goods, just whether you can be made to pay for them.

Take a look at the link. But to answer this point:

“ No. If you receive merchandise that you didn’t order, you have a legal right to keep it as a free gift.”

When a new law office was setup it would be sent books and lawyer-related equipment, along with a bill for payment

Not just law offices. EVERY office I ever worked in pre-internet had to deal with this. Almost always it was toner for the copier.

Some of the more clever scammers would call an office and say, "I'm Bill from the copier company. Can you tell me what model of copier we have over there? Oh, and what was your name again?" And when the office drone replied, the scammer would send out hundreds of dollars worth of toner and other supplies, plus an invoice for thousands of dollars, and say that it was authorized, by name, by the person who answered the phone.

> But that isn't how the real world works. Who here doesn't have any previous contact with amazon? What if the package contains something very illegal (drugs etc) and the police are watching it?

That reminds me of a similar scenario: a few years ago the UK enacted a new law (or was about to?) that forced people to decrypt any data they had if the courts asked them to. Burden of proof that they don't have the cryptographic keys was on the person in possession of that data.

So some people who were against this law considered sending some hard disk that might or might not contain encrypted child porn and similar nasties on hard disks to the relevant ministers addresses, report them for possession of dangerous data to the police, and then wish them good luck proving they don't have the keys. (Or, more likely: walking back on the law.)

I question the validity of this advice (and Citizen's Advice's advice) in the UK.

If you're sent something with a bill for payment then it seems to me that you are not entitled to keep it at all because the bill indicates that they are not gifting the items to you but expect payment for them. I.e. property rights have not been transferred.

You can of course keep the items and wait until being asked for them back (and then you obviously don't have to pay for sending them back) but that does not mean that you can keep them as in "they are yours to keep".

According to another comment it seems indeed fine to keep these unordered items in the US by Federal Law, but I don't think this is the case in the UK unless the intent is clear (and, for example, a bill clearly indicates what the intention is).

Edit:

Ah, I stand corrected. There is indeed a law similar to the US's one in the UK:

The Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013

"(4) In the case of an unsolicited supply of goods, the consumer may, as between the consumer and the trader, use, deal with or dispose of the goods as if they were an unconditional gift to the consumer.”." [1]

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2013/3134/regulation/39/...

If the U.K. properly implemented the European directives, if a company sends you something without you requesting it (e.a. Unsolicited) than it’s legally a gift. Even if they add a bill (it’s unsolicited after all).

If they request it back you may send it back with property rights reverting to them (it’s a gift again) but legally there is no way to enforce it nor is there a request to get anything back For it (Ea. Money or other credit)

If there is no contract (Ea a purchase request/ intend) than anything a company Can send to a consumer is a gift.

> If there is no contract (Ea a purchase request/ intend) than anything a company Can send to a consumer is a gift.

I understand that there are restrictions to unsolicited goods, perhaps even a ban.

But an absence of contract does not make something a gift. Whether something is a gift or an offer to purchase or anything else depends on the facts, it's not implied.

So either there is a statute that says this case is legally treated as a gift or the item remain the property of the sender until the intention is clear.

Edit: There is indeed a law that makes it a gift (from EU Directive you mention, perhaps). See my previous comment above. This is indeed required because as explained it cannot be implied.

The directive is an old one making all consumer business laws in the union more or less the same.

The thing that makes it a gift, is that A gift is the only allowed legal transformation that can happen. (Ownerships transfer is a transition in the legal sense). Ea. A company is required to always act lawfully and the only action open for unsolicited (=anything without a predefined base) package is to gift it.

A contract (=agreement to do something in exchange for something else, usually in paper but can be in any form even verbally) is needed before any transformation besides gifting.

This legal sense does not mean it’s still proper to send the package back if the company contacts you and pays for the shipping, but that’s not in law.

The detective I remember reading about during my ‘middle school’ studies (around 1998). I could be mistaken In it and if I am feel free to tell me. All I remember was that the directive made it so that all in the commons market must implement similar protections for Consumers regarding unsolicited mail and package by companies, not in small part to stop the extortion type of sale practice of the “free sample with overpriced subscription” (it’s why they switched to you having to request the sample)

The thing that makes it a gift is that there is a law that explicitly makes it so.

Without such explicit law it wouldn't be a gift because it isn't the intention of the sender. These goods are sent as an offer. If you accept the offer then indeed a contract is formed, but if you refuse the offer then nothing happens, i.e. the goods remain the property of the sender.

That's why they enacted that law, in order to stop the practice altogether in one fell swoop as long as the public is aware of it (which clearly is still not really the case).

The Directive is from 2011. That's the one that was transposed in UK law through the Regulation I mention in a previous comment.

You make it clearer than I said it. Thank you for that. And I learned from you that the U.K. implemented the detective by explicitly making the action a gift, this differs from my country in that regard. (I am always glad to learn something new)

I’m not sure if my experience is unique, but I get so many packages from amazon so often that I don’t even bother looking too closely at the box or even have a clue which delivery might be inside. Someone could easily drop a package at my doorstep and I’ll pick it up and put it in my house without any awareness. Sometimes those packages will go for a while without being opened too, until I realize I need something I ordered. I could easily be holding a brick of cocaine for a while and not know.

Obviously if it's something you don't want, you don't have to keep it.

I have never and likely will never register for an Amazon account. When parcels show up mistakenly (and they do!) with that 'Prime' label I know right away I didn't have anything to do with me. :3

There's a lot of reasons I will never register for an Amazon account; the majority of which are directly related to the treatment of their employees, and if it wasn't that, it would be Amazon's complete unwillingness to do something about the litany of fake products filling it's virtual shelves, or the fake reviews that make it so we can't differentiate between the real product and fake.

I hardly believe I am the only person on Hacker News to have also held out. Seeing Bezo's net value vs. what employees are paid is enough to make it worth going down the road and paying a couple dollars extra.

I remember when COVID first broke out and Amazon refused to cover even sanitizer or masks for their employees, much less any extra compensation for volunteering to help keep the world together in a massive disaster.

Amazon epitomizes the 'slavery with extra steps' phrase from Rick and Morty, and additionally epitomizes the truly horrific nature of inequality of wealth.

Here in the Czech Republic the wages at Amazon aren't so bad. Unlike many other unqualified jobs, they still attract Czech employees and do not have to import cheaper workforce from abroad (Ukraine, Mongolia, Balkan states).

What people find hard to adjust to is the company culture, basically you are a human robot.

Rick and Morty has another one for that, just YouTube 'you pass butter'.

> When parcels show up [...] with that 'Prime' label

Alternatively, it could be that you ordered the product from another seller, e.g. on eBay, who is then using their Amazon Prime subscription as a fulfilment mechanism. (A form of drop-shipping.)

You might want to reconsider your approach to those amazon boxes...

1) Amazon puts 'Prime' labelling on all their parcels, not just ones shipped to Prime members 2) People use Amazon as a way to send people gifts! If I know your address, I could order you something I think you might like from Amazon. They'll even giftwrap it and put in a thoughtful note from me! You don't need an account for that to happen. 3) Because of the ubiquity of Amazon, the world is full of reused Amazon Prime labelled boxes. Maybe your ebay seller is shipping you something in a previously-bought-from-Amazon box.

> the litany of fake products filling it's virtual shelves

Have only had one purchase not be what I expected (over 10 years) and that was quickly returned for a refund.

Amazon employees are not slaves. They can find employment elsewhere. For you to equate them to slaves is so racist that it doesn't belong on HN.

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