Courtesy of Christina
It started like any other online order. A simple purchase of Neil Young’s 2025 album “Oceanside Countryside.”
“We ordered a single copy of the record—as one does—on May 2,” Christina says, recalling the purchase she and her husband, Sean, made.
The album was delivered May 7. Then two more copies showed up.
“I thought, Wow I didn’t know Sean loved Neil Young this much,” Christina recalls. But Sean hadn’t ordered them, and when they checked their credit card, there were no new charges. It seemed like a harmless glitch. They shrugged, kept the extras, and moved on.
Then five more copies arrived.
That’s when “the tone of the situation changed from odd to absurd,” Christina says.
Over the next two months, the Brooklyn couple received 40 unsolicited copies of the same record. They weren’t being scammed. They weren’t being charged. But they also couldn’t make the deliveries stop.
So, what was going on?
A ‘literal and spiritual burden’
As the deliveries kept coming, what started as a novelty turned into a daily source of stress. By early June, Christina could see in the couple’s FedEx account that more records were already en route, even as they were still trying to deal with the last batch.
“I began to dread coming home and finding another box to add to our pile,” she says. “The records were a burden, literally and spiritually.”
At first, they tried to manage the influx—unboxing and stacking the albums neatly in a corner. But eventually, the effort wore them down.
“We gave up on that and just kept a big pile of cardboard boxes near our front door.”
A friend who came over for their son’s first birthday mistook the stack for books (the couple are avid readers).
Customer service, meanwhile, continued to suggest “solutions” that made no practical sense. One email encouraged them to refuse delivery—so Christina tried it.
“I thought those would be magic words,” she says. “But they weren’t. Both times the delivery person didn’t really get what I was trying to do, and I felt crazy.”
Another suggestion was to print prepaid return labels and mail the records back, as if the couple—who are both working parents—had the bandwidth or desire to become a reverse distribution center.
“There was no way we were going to do this when we were receiving literally a record a day with no signs of them slowing down,” Christina says. “Were we supposed to go to FedEx once a week to send the records we didn’t ask for back to them?”
Eventually, even the company gave up on asking.
The breaking point
By mid-June, the couple had moved past frustration into something closer to resignation. The records had taken on a kind of permanence—a looming presence at the threshold of their home.
Weeks of failed fixes had worn them down. They weren’t being charged, but they weren’t being listened to either. That’s when Sean snapped.
“Two more record shipments created today and no response from you,” he wrote to customer service on June 10. “Not to mention the three(!!!!!) that are out for delivery. Let it be known that you have done NOTHING to resolve this. Every new record I get is going straight in the trash. I’m done.”
By then, the record no longer felt like a charming mistake or even an annoyance. It felt cursed.
“We listened to the album a few times after it arrived,” Christina says. “It’s a nice one! Once we had a pile of copies, it started to feel a little cursed and we have stopped listening to it.”
They hadn’t asked for this. They couldn’t stop it. And no one could tell them why it was happening in the first place.
They’re not alone: ‘It’s been hell’
Sean and Christina’s record saga ended without fanfare. The boxes stopped coming. They never got an explanation. But they got their hallway back.
Others haven’t been so lucky.
A San Jose, CA, woman endured something far worse: hundreds of oversized Amazon packages delivered to her home over the course of a year. Inside each one? Car seat covers ordered by strangers, returned by frustrated customers, and routed to her address without her knowledge or consent.
“What you see now is a fraction,” “Kay” (not her real name) told ABC7’s “7 On Your Side,” gesturing toward the mound of boxes in her driveway. “Because I have refused delivery on more packages than you see here.”
Unlike Sean and Christina’s glitch, Kay’s ordeal was linked to an overseas Amazon seller violating the platform’s return policy. The seller had listed Kay’s home as a U.S. return address to avoid costly international shipping, effectively turning Kay’s property into an unpaid warehouse. Her packages blocked her mail carrier, her driveway, even access to her home for her 88-year-old mother, who is disabled.
“When we come home, it was like this,” she said. “I couldn’t even get my mother in the house … it’s just been another form of hell.”
Kay filed six complaint tickets with Amazon. Each time, she was told the issue would be resolved. The boxes kept coming.
Eventually, a local news segment prompted Amazon to remove the packages and promise to “crack down” on the abuse. But by then, Kay had lived with the mess for over a year.
“Why is it my responsibility to get rid of this,” she asked, “when your seller is not following your rules, Amazon?”
The unexpected cost of the e-commerce era
Most homeowners worry about things like leaky roofs, rising property taxes, or noisy neighbors. But as Sean, Christina, and Kay learned, there’s a new kind of threat few people see coming: your home address being exploited by systems you don’t control.
Today’s logistics networks are built on data—tracking numbers, shipping defaults, return policies, autofill fields. A simple error or loophole can transform a residential address into an unauthorized warehouse, a dumping ground, or a return center for products no one there ever asked for. Sometimes it’s a glitch. Other times, it’s a deliberate move by bad actors looking to cut corners. Either way, homeowners are left to deal with the fallout.
These cases are rare, but they point to a broader vulnerability. In a world where data is currency, your address is part of your digital footprint, traded, stored, and reused in ways most people never see. And when things go wrong, there’s often no human in the loop to fix it.