Mysterious NY address sending Americans baseballs and hair ties in mail. Those who accepted now stuck in a sinister plot

A Nashville resident took to TikTok to talk about how she keeps getting white envelopes at her doorstep even though she didn’t order anything. Confused, she took to the app and asked whether anyone else was going through the same thing — turns out, she was not alone. According to the Better Business Bureau’s national scam tracker, this was part of a new scheme called a “brushing scam.”

Candi Kready explained to her TikTok followers that for the past week she had received countless envelopes. Sometimes more than one arrived at the same time. Nobody in her household ordered anything, and the packages mirrored that reality because they were all empty.

According to Robyn Householder, head of the Middle Tennessee BBB, there’s a method to the madness behind this scam. Householder told Nashville’s News Channel 5, “The internet is a really wonderful tool, but it’s also a very frightening tool because it does give scammers so much information about us.” According to her, the scammers are using that information to boost their ratings online.

Scams these days are everywhere you look — from car dealerships to even influencers people have grown to love and trust. It was always going to be a matter of time before they fully migrated online, especially considering the tech titans are often too enamored with the idea of growth in market cap to commit to meaningful guardrails.

The way the scam works is that an international or third-party seller sends unsuspecting Americans empty packages. And since they’re now “verified buyers” on platforms like Walmart, Amazon, and eBay, the scammers can then use their information — which they’ve scraped online — to post positive reviews for the sellers. This then leads to the sellers being boosted by e-commerce sites, with the hope that the higher visibility will translate into more sales.

Householder said she has been a victim of these scams too, and that it’s cause for real concern. She continued, “It’s an immediate call to action for you to check your credit rating, change your passwords, see if there’s any unusual activity. If you’re currently not getting banking alerts for transactions, set that up for all of your credit cards.”

She had one more plea: if you do receive these mysterious packages, immediately contact the retailer and ensure any reviews tied to your account are removed. But that doesn’t exactly mean the packages will stop arriving. Householder explained, “Because you accepted the package, that scammer now knows that the address and the name is legitimate, which means they’re probably going to use it more often.”

Kready told the media that so far she’s received nine packages in total. But apparently, she was the lucky one because getting an empty package in this scenario is actually rare. Some people receive used products, empty boxes, broken perfume bottles, and the like.

You could also stand to be a bit more vigilant when you’re on the internet. There are many resources that can help scrub your data from online databases. Always unsubscribe from unnecessary mailing lists — and this should go without saying, but do not click on links from anonymous email addresses.