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Comment by BigTTYGothGF | Hacker News Reader

People with Chinese names do sometimes live in Delaware.

Do they all live at the same address of the overseas freight forwarder too? I've sold stuff on eBay to someone in Europe who had me ship to the same address in Delaware. I was confused so I googled the address and turned up the freight forwarding service.

This has happened to me a couple of times with eBay sales.

Is it safe to transact with people who use freight forwarders in your experience? Do you lose any protections?

Out of fear, in my cases, I cancelled the auctions.

On second thought though, I wonder if it's actually the buyer using the service that is more at risk (introduction of 3rd party, more complex delivery, probably impossible to return, etc)

What's not safe for you? They pay you the money, then you send the item to the address they ask. You already got the money! Cancelling the sale because the buyer wants to spend a bit less on shipping seems like an awful thing to do. International shipping gets ridiculously expensive, so combining multiple small packages into one shipment makes perfect sense.

If you are selling in the US, and an account with a primary address overseas buys your item and uses a US shipping address, you are likely shipping to a package forwarder. These services are common because many people and businesses in the US only ship to the US.

I have my eBay account set this way, and I still get bids from overseas accounts -- I always Google the shipping address, 100% of the time it has been a package forwarder.

And Australia; ~5% of Australia's population is Chinese origin.

With their profile in Australia?

While this is likely what the op was suggesting,

I would like to point out that in Australia and NZ, it can be a massive pain to find someone who will ship internationally.

Normally this is for things like Amazon US, and other US-based companies. There are services[1][2] that advertise virtual postal addresses in your purchase-country where they’ll box and ship it to you.

So yes, a Chinese name based in Australia with a shipping address in the US isn’t immediately a red flag. Lots of Chinese in Australia and NZ, and lots of people here like to use shipping services like this.

1. https://www.nzpost.co.nz/tools/you-shop

2. https://www.choice.com.au/shopping/online-shopping/buying-on... (Scroll to bottom)

> Chinese name based in Australia with a shipping address in the US isn’t immediately a red flag

And a good thing, too, or I would be concerned about posting that I knew it was going somewhere forbidden.

Sometimes. But the vast proportion live in China. Like 9000 vs 1.4 Billion.

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