Customers Sometimes Receive Unwanted Sex Toys From Amazon
The adult products might arrive in the mail unbidden, or they are swapped with the real item the customer ordered.
By Jessie Schiewe
“Funny, I don’t remember ordering all of these sex toys, yet here they all are.” (Photo: Flickr/Drew Stephens)
Dani Drasin had been jonesing for a cup of coffee when her 3-pack of Nespresso pods from Amazon arrived.
She’d run out of the coffee capsules a few days earlier and the caffeine withdrawals since then had been something fierce. As the owner of an emerging sunglasses brand, she relied on the stuff to get her through the day, often starting her mornings with two cups, back-to-back.
Drasin felt relief sweep over her on the day her Amazon order arrived. Since she’d been without the Nespresso pods, she’d gotten her caffeine fixes from any of the myriad coffee shops within walking distance to her boyfriend’s apartment in Brooklyn (where she had shipped the order).
“They Put My Face On Sex Toy Batteries”
But not being able to make a cup at home, to have it immediately available whenever she craved it, had been annoying. As Drasin cut the tape off the Amazon box, she could anticipate the smell of the coffee she was about to brew.
Except that never happened.
Though the package said it had been sent from “USA Coffee” in Lexington, Kentucky, there were no Nespresso pods inside.
It wasn’t entirely empty, though.
Wrapped inside of a gray plastic bag was a slender box that read: “Magic Wand Massager.”
Instead of coffee pods, Drasin had been sent a random vibrator.
That does not look like a 30-pack of Nespresso pods. (Photo: Dani Drasin)
At first, she wasn’t sure what to think about the surprise sex toy.
“Nespresso pods are such a standard thing that I order all the time and I’ve never had issues with them before,” she told OK Whatever. “And, because Amazon has become something we all trust so much, to order something and get the complete opposite is just very unexpected.”
“It’s one thing if they accidentally send you pliers or something boring. But, like, a sex toy?”
Granted, Drasin is no stranger to receiving naughty accessories as gifts. She and I have been friends since high school, and as a going-away-to-college gift in the mid-2000s, I gave her a pack of branded Marc Jacobs condoms.
But receiving sex stuff from your best friend is a lot different from having it show up randomly in the mail, especially when you learn you’re not the only one this has been happening to.
For the last few years, someone has been shipping out random products, usually sex toys, to Amazon customers in the U.S., U.K., and Canada.
Sometimes the items arrive randomly out-of-the-blue, even if no orders have been placed with Amazon. Other times, like in Drasin’s situation, the sex toys are swapped in place of the real products the person had ordered.
“Hunny, did you order an XXL rainbow dildo from Amazon?” (Photo: Flickr/Stock Catalog)
That’s what happened to a customer in Wales who received a Durex Play bullet vibrator instead of a kettle they’d been expecting.
And in 2018, over a dozen anonymous, never-ordered Amazon packages arrived at several colleges in Canada, some containing fleshlights and G-spot vibrators.
Despite the efforts of journalists and some of the more freaked-out package recipients, there’s no clear answer as to why this is happening. Nobody, not even Amazon, knows the real cause.
But there are theories. One posits that sellers are buying and shipping their own products in a scheme known as verified review hacking. The products are purchased using dummy accounts and gift cards, giving the seller the ability to write glowing, 5-star reviews while seeming like a real customer.
But there are holes to this theory. The fact that the products are mailed to real customers’ addresses, instead of, say, a holding facility or storage unit, isn’t accounted for. Also, this only explains the unsolicited Amazon packages containing sex toys, not the ones that have been swapped with truly ordered items.
Which brings us to the idea that maybe it’s an individual who’s behind the mix-ups. A person working from within Amazon, maybe, or, as one Reddit user suggested, someone attempting credit card fraud.
A person might hack into someone’s Amazon account and order an item using the customer’s on-file credit card and address. Once the order is placed, the hacker would then attempt to switch the shipping address to their own. And sometimes, depending on the mail carrier, that doesn’t work, with the product arriving at the unsuspecting customer’s address instead, confusing the shit out of them.
Or maybe Amazon customers aren’t so much being hacked as they are intentionally messed with. Maybe there’s someone behind this who’s choreographing the whole scheme for no reason other than that it’s amusing to interfere with the lives of others.
And certainly for some people, the experience leaves them quite shaken. An Amazon customer named Nikki was convinced she was being cyberstalked and that her personal security was at stake after receiving a $25 vibrator in the mail. She also received a few other random, un-ordered items like cable cords and headphones.
For weeks, Nikki hounded Amazon with phone calls, hoping to find out who had mailed her the items. She even got a law enforcement officer on the line with an Amazon representative, the Daily Beast reports.
“I could imagine some people being very upset,” Drasin said.
In particular, she worried about what her boyfriend would think of the clunky vibrator.
“When I realized what I’d been sent, I was like, ‘Oh my god, he’ll probably think I ordered this for us.’ But he actually thought it was pretty funny when I told him.”
And, she has no doubts that for some people, receiving a mysterious sex toy in the mail can be super-awesome.
“They’re probably like, ‘Oh, great! Let me try this out!’ ”
At least one person has had that reaction. The Amazon customer in Wales who got the bullet vibrator instead of the tea kettle shared on Reddit that they were particularly pleased with the mail glitch.
“[The vibrator] cost more than the kettle itself,” they wrote. “Good times were had — followed by tea, which was nice.”
If Drasin’s unsolicited Magic Wand Massager had truly been “magic,” she wouldn’t know. It never even made it out of the packaging before she mailed it back to Amazon.
“I was quite shocked as to what it was,” she wrote in an email to Amazon after “opening a case” for receiving the wrong item.
In the end, Drasin never got the Nespresso pods she’d ordered, but she did get her money back. And she clearly doesn’t feel as if a bridge has been burned between her and Amazon. She still orders her coffee pods — as well as tons of other stuff — from them.
Now, looking back on the time she received the random vibrator from Amazon, Drasin still finds it amusing.
“I saw the humor in it from day one,” she said. “When you take sex toys out of context, they can be kind of funny.”
JESSIE SCHIEWE IS THE EDITOR OF OK WHATEVER. SHE BELIEVES IN MERMAIDS AND THRIFT SHOPS FOR EXERCISE.
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