Imagine dozens of packages piling up outside your home day after day—and you didn’t order a single one of them.
For one south suburban Oak Forest man, a TikTok shipping glitch became a months-long mystery of misdelivered returns.
“Every day coming home from working, I’m thinking, ‘Okay, how many are there today?’” said Charles Coleman of Oak Forest.
Coleman saie, in this situation, a porch pirate would’ve been a hero.“I’d see more packages on the porch and my heart sank. I’m thinking, ‘This is never going to end,'” Coleman said.
Coleman is not an avid online shopper, so when dozens of random packages began arriving his doorstep last Fall, he said it was overwhelming.
“The label just said ‘aromatherapy’ and it had my address, did not have my name. So i opened it up and it turns out to be a diffuser,” Coleman said.
The diffusers are in the shape of a fireplace, and are sold by multiple TikTok shops—but for some reason- Coleman’s address was being given out as the place to return them.“I’m not on TikTok at all,” he said.
Coleman estimates more than 150 packages have been sent to his house since September. At one point, he posted signs in and around his mailbox. office started rejecting the packages, but UPS and FedEx carriers would often still try to deliver them.
“It also concerned me because i thought it was gonna interfere with my legitimate mail, legitimate packages, prescriptions, and things like that,” Coleman said.
There was a name on all of these packages, and even a phone number on a few. NBC 5 Responds called the number and talked to that person. But he said he wasn’t on TikTok, definitely didn’t run a TikTok shop selling diffusers- and had nothing to do with the returns Coleman was receiving.
So why was this happening?
Kevin Brassler with Consumers Checkbook said Coleman’s address was likely chosen randomly, and it is a form of identity theft.
“Scammers are basically sending stuff out, they know they’re going to get a lot of returns, and they’ve set up somebody else to have to handle the returns. They’re trying to disguise where they are, and one way to do that is if TikTok Shop is requiring you to send out, oh, here you have to have an address people can return stuff to if they don’t like it, well, he’s using a fake address,” Brassler said.
But why wouldn’t the seller want their merchandise back? Brassler says it may come down to poor product quality.“A lot of times it’s so costly for them to repackage it and resell it and reprocess it for another buyer that it’s just easier to keep, you know, just keep the thing,” said Brassler.
Coleman wrote to TikTok, the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Postal Inspector but couldn’t get anywhere – until he contacted NBC 5 Responds.“You solved problems for people that had these annoying issues. So i reached out and you lived up to your name,” he said.
A TikTok shop spokesperson told us they connected with the shop and had them remove the incorrect return address. They would not provide any other details about the mixup.
“I’m eternally grateful for that, you fixed it,” Coleman said.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, if you receive merchandise you didn’t order, you generally have the legal right to keep it as a free gift. But if like Coleman, you have no interest in keeping the items, you can contact the Post Office and have them refuse the packages.
That’s a bit trickier to do with UPS and FedEx, but still possible. Finally, if your address is being used without your consent, experts say it’s a good idea to check your credit report and even lock your credit – because you could be a victim of identity theft.
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