A man in Chicago found himself overwhelmed with packages from TikTok showing up at his door last year. The strange phenomenon would spark a months-long mystery as the man struggled to get in contact with the video-sharing platform, meanwhile, the boxes would continue to pile up outside his front door.
Last Summer, Charles Coleman arrived home to find a pile of packages had been delivered to his address. The boxes had a label that read, “aromatherapy,” along with Coleman’s address. He may have assumed it was just a one-off case of someone putting the wrong address, but pretty soon more would show up on his porch, then more, then even more.
In an attempt to get to the bottom of the mystery Coleman opened the packages only to find cheap diffusers in the shape of a fireplace inside. The items are sold by many TikTok shops but that doesn’t exactly explain why they were coming here. So Coleman did what any person would do, he tried to get in contact with TikTok to have this problem sorted out.
However, his attempts to make contact would not see a response and as the weeks turned into months the packages continued to pile up. All in all, he estimated more than 150 packages had been delivered to his home. Coleman even put up signs to direct couriers not to leave the boxes there and he feared it would interfere with his legitimate mail, “packages, prescriptions, and things like that.”
It may have been part of a TikTok scam
Out of desperation, Coleman contacted NBC 5 Responds which contacted a number that was on a few of the packages, however, they denied knowing about the deliveries and stated they did not run a TikTok shop. Another dead end.
So what was going on? Well, according to Kevin Brassler with the Consumers Checkbook, it’s most likely a TikTok scam. The address was probably chosen at random as a bizarre form of identity theft. Apparently this isn’t an entirely unique practice as scammers will allegedly pick a random address to list for returns as they know they need one, but of course, they don’t want to use their own address, so people like Coleman get stuck dealing with the consequences.
As for why the seller wouldn’t want the product back, it’s simply a case of the poor quality item not being worth the money and effort of repackaging it. The seller can make more money simply by sending a new one rather than taking back items from dissatisfied customers.
Thankfully Coleman was able to put a stop to the deliveries after getting in contact with NBC 5 Responds. A TikTok spokesperson told NBC they had reached out to the seller and had the incorrect address removed although did not provide further comment.
