Lisa Klebba, from a small town in Michigan, checked her mail one day recently and found a surprise: a package from Kyrgyzstan.
“I was like, this is weird. So I looked at it and I’m like, did I order something from China?”
Though from Kyrgyzstan, the package looked like one that she had previously received from China after ordering from AliExpress. She thought it may have been a small dental tool that she ordered months before but hadn’t yet received. So she opened the packaged just to discover that it was completely empty.
“There was nothing in it!” she exclaimed, “I was like, holy cow, this is one of those things!”
So she began searching the internet for clues as to why she may have been sent an empty package from Kyrgyzstan, and came upon an article that I wrote on Forbes in 2017 about Heaven McGeehan, a Pennsylvania woman who receives unordered packages from China almost daily:
“… when she opened it she found a small handful of black hair ties with cheap plastic hearts that had the word “Phoenix” emblazoned upon them. She was bewildered. The package was clearly addressed to her—her name was correct and so was her address—but she wasn’t the one who placed the order and had no idea why someone in China would send it to her. Then the following day it happened again: another unordered package from China arrived containing the same item. Then it happened again the following day, and again, and again, and again without end until the small, unsolicited parcels began piling up in McGeehan’s home.
“I receive at least one a day, sometimes multiple,” she explained.”