Woman Bombarded With Mystery Walmart Packages of BBQ Sauce—'Crazy'
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content.
Nicole Nassif, a Chicago resident, has been receiving packages of Sweet Baby Ray's sauce since early 2025, a local outlet reported.
At first, she thought nothing of it, as she is a restaurant owner and believed the sauce to be a promotional gift. However, the sauce just kept coming, according to an ABC7 Chicago report.
She told ABC7: "It was crazy. I mean, honestly, it was nuts. I was like, what in the hay is going on?"
Nassif discovered the sauce was being sent to her house because it was listed as a return address for a page on Walmart Marketplace, Walmart's equivalent to Amazon. Meaning, people thought they were returning sauce to the site they bought it from, but were actually sending it to Nassif, according to ABC7.
Walmart told Newsweek that it "takes the integrity of its Marketplace seriously."
Newsweek has reached Nassif for comment via LinkedIn.
Box with logo for Walmart online ordering and delivery, San Ramon, California, May 12, 2020. This box is not connected to the sauce being delivered to Nicole Nassif.
Box with logo for Walmart online ordering and delivery, San Ramon, California, May 12, 2020. This box is not connected to the sauce being delivered to Nicole Nassif.
Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
Why It Matters
Data policy analyst Eli Clemens told ABC7 that this situation can happen to anyone with a publicly listed address, as some overseas vendors selling on U.S. marketplaces will list random American addresses scraped from the internet for their domestic returns, likely in order to avoid paying for pre-paid international return labels.
What To Know
Nassif, who runs Imee's Mediterranean Kitchen in Chicago, told ABC7 that she started getting boxes that specifically contained two bottles of sauce addressed to her restaurant, at her home address.
When the boxes of sauce, as well as a few of toilet cleaner, showed no sign of stopping, she called the numbers associated with the addresses on the parcels. She then reached a woman named Debbie. This is how she found out that her home was listed as a return address for a Walmart Marketplace seller.
The sauce was "crazy" enough, but she grew more concerned when she got a letter from a sweets and cough-drop manufacturer alleging she was stealing its intellectual property because it believed she was selling its product via the Walmart Marketplace account linked to her address.
Nassif told ABC7 she spent at least 60 hours trying to contact Walmart about the sauce, and she added that the account containing her address was not taken down by Walmart from the site for over five weeks.
Contacted by Newsweek, a Walmart spokesperson provided the following statement: "Walmart takes the integrity of its Marketplace seriously, using multiple layers of verification and continuous monitoring to help ensure that only legitimate, trustworthy sellers are allowed on the platform. We have zero tolerance for inaccuracies and take swift action to remove noncompliant listings."
She is not the only person who has ended up an accidental victim of online marketplace address scams. A woman in San Jose, California, found her home bombarded with Amazon packages on her doorstep after her address was listed as the return site for an overseas car seat cover seller, as reported by ABC7 and The New York Times.
Karen Holton told The New York Times that she had to store the parcels in her carport, but that prevented her from being able to park there. She said she was hoping someone would steal a few of them, but "even thieves didn't want it."
Amazon eventually sent a large truck to come pick up the parcels from her house.
What People Are Saying
Amazon spokeswoman, Sharyn Ghacham, said in the statement, as reported by The New York Times: "We'd like to thank ABC 7 On Your Side for bringing this to our attention. We've apologized to the customer and are coordinating with the seller responsible toward a permanent resolution."
Eli Clemens, a policy analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank based in Washington, D.C, told ABC7: "Unfortunately, I think U.S. consumers are just going to be the victims in this, and there's not a lot of options for recourse. Online marketplaces will respond to this media attention, I think that can amplify that. And that's definitely what's happening in this case."
What Happens Next
Clemens has suggested paying for data removal services to prevent this from happening, but warned that it is very difficult to completely ensure this will never happen.
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