This is an EMS/Amazon hack. Drop shippers on Amazon will list something of high value on Amazon as shipping from outside of the country - I bought an Intel i9 processor this way. Anyway, you buy it, Amazon pays them, and they put a package in the mail. And since it's ePacket, which uses different numbers depending on whether it's China, Hong Kong, Singapore, or whatever, you need to be reasonably clever to see the actual progress with the ePacket. Better yet, Amazon won't give you any details beyond "shipped" and the minute EMS hits a container ship, things go dark until it hits the port of entry. Back to my i9. I bought it and fed the number into an app I had on Android that let me choose which flavor of ePacket I was looking for. Turns out my package that was supposedly coming out of Guangzhou was actually coming out of somewhere else, and it wasn't coming EMS it was coming ePacket Singapore. I went to EMS Singapore's website and fed in the number and the package was going to North Carolina, not Seattle. So I called up Amazon who promptly refunded my money and skunked the package. I saw it land in NC about a week later. However, if you're doing surface shipment off of Aliexpress or whatever, you've got a 5-week hole in which nothing happens. Which is long enough to get the money, transfer it out and put it in a new bank account where Amazon can't take it. So the way the scam works is this: list a bunch of shit on Amazon or eBay, put a bunch of "things that weigh about as much as earbuds" in envelopes and ship them the slow way to confirmed addresses from prior mailing lists. Get the money and dump it out of the account and put it in another one. By the time people figure out their earbuds aren't actually coming from China, the scammers have their money. Etsy or eBay or Amazon can refund it to the customer (and they will, otherwise their entire business model crumbles) and there will be no enforcement whatsoever across international borders. I've known three people who have gotten seeds. All three of them have bought some cheap tacky knick knacks out of China in the past three years. Guaranteed: for every packet of seeds sent, there's a piece of electronics purchased on Amazon, eBay or Etsy that never made it to the destination. Globalization at its finest.