
Mystery seeds arrive in Australia from Asia, prompting fears of biosecurity risk - adrian_mrd
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-26/australians-warned-to-be-on-look-out-for-mystery-seeds/12592348
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eindiran
My mom uses a gardening community app which has users from around the world.
According to her, many users across several continents/countries have been
experiencing this (North America, Europe, Australia, other parts of Asia). You
receive a package in the mail which contains some small, low-value item (often
seeds) that you definitely didn't order. Some of her friends on the app have
apparently tried planting the seeds and have grown unexciting plants (eg
tomatoes). But, for fear of unleashing an invasive species, don't do this.

The prevailing hypothesis is that it has to do with spoofing reviews on some
ecommerce platforms. The sellers can boost their apparent number of sales and
give themselves fake reviews, but there is a customs verification step which
requires them to verify for the platform that they actually sent out a
package. So they create a fake package with something very cheap inside and
mail it to a random address in the country of their choice.

There have been a number of articles concerning it as well: for example, this
one from Chicago -- [https://abc7chicago.com/china-seeds-from-plant-in-
mail/63385...](https://abc7chicago.com/china-seeds-from-plant-in-
mail/6338535/)

