
Belgian man has been receiving pizzas he never ordered for years - pachico
https://www.brusselstimes.com/all-news/belgium-all-news/114806/belgian-man-has-been-receiving-pizzas-he-never-ordered-for-years/
======
avs733
It's easy to assume maliciousness in something like this but it is just as
easily explained by just stupidity.

My Fiance has a fairly common name, and is the owner of the associated gmail
account (think John.Smith@gmail.com). Several older women in other states have
the same name...and seem to repeatedly beleive they have her email. My fiance
got so frustrated with Walmart orders, amazon orders, bills, personal emails
being sent to her that she tracked one lady down and called her.

The lady got angry that my fiance was 'using her email address and hacking
her' and had to have it repeatedly explained that the old lady's email address
was in fact slightly different (number at the end). It keeps happening. the
lady writes it down wrong, her husband enters it wrong, her HOA (at her new
house) enters it wrong. When the HOA got it wrong we told them and they asked
us to fix it for them...We finally seemed to get some purchase on behavior
change when we cancelled one of her orders via email. But the amount of
information/influence we had over her accounts with just email was amazing. At
one point, her husband used my fiance's email to register a bank account. We
called the bank and after explaining the situation were able to CORRECT the
email address for her (we decided that a bank account was serious enough to
fix it rather than just be annoyed).

I think its perfectly valid to be concerned this is malicious or evil...but so
many people are just inept technology users.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
This is a great reason to not have gmail/yahoo/outlook/hotmail addresses: It's
really hard to accidentally send an email to my domain. And people misentering
my address are very unlikely to hit another valid one.

~~~
avs733
totally agree. but it is also sooo convienient as a junk mail address for
signups.

Just like biometrics aren't a password but are a good user ID, I have a couple
different email address that I use for very different purposes that involve
different exposure. My work email never has anything not work related, my
personal email rarely gets ads and I prune it aggressively...my gmail looks
like a syphilitic brain and I don't mind because I know what it is.

~~~
the_duke
I have a dedicated, very generic sounding domain name just for signups.

I use a custom email for each service. Like xyz.amazon@my-generic-domain.com
for Amazon, xyz.ycombinator@... and so on.

All email is forwarded to a single catch-all account from a good provider, so
it is just as convenient to use.

But it is trivial to isolate what emails came from which service, who has
leaked my email to spammers, to just block a individual recipient, ... . It
also makes it easy to have multiple accounts without the annoyance of a
fallback email.

I wish I had switched to this method much earlier.

Ideally that domain would be used by at least a few hundred people to prevent
associating via domain name though, with different prefixes (see xyz above)
for each user.

~~~
kyuudou
For over a decade I've used hushmail's aliasing feature which allows you to
create such custom emails (e.g. dontspamme-hackernews@nym.hush.com) on the fly
almost instantaneously. I use one per service that requires an email to sign
up. Works great.

You can do it with the free account, too.

Just delete one if you are obviously getting spam because of a service selling
their email lists. Which is a reality for "free" services. Bonus points
because you can identify exactly who it is that is doing this and have the
option of publicly shaming them.

------
pachico
Hi, I'm the one who posted this article. I'm sorry I bothered someone by doing
so, I can share, thought, why I did it. I've been working on e-commerce for 20
years already and I have experienced or seen very curious things related to
fraud, geo localisation mistakes, and false claims too. As someone already
mentioned in the comments, I thought this could actually be one of those
cases.

Again, sorry if it bothered you.

~~~
joshuaheard
Follow the money. Why doesn't he contact the delivery restaurant and find out
who paid? Also, if he never orders pizza, have the restaurants put him on a
"no delivery" list.

~~~
m_t
Reading the article, it sounds that it is pay on delivery, not on order.

> “I have always refused the deliveries, so I have never paid for anything,”
> he said, adding that the harassment is not only annoying for him, but also
> for restaurants.

> “It costs them money and they have to throw the food away. On the day that
> ten deliveries showed up, I did the math: it cost €450,” Van Landeghem said.

------
withinboredom
I’m a US expat living in the Netherlands. I often have to use built-in browser
translation services to fill out forms. It’s amazing how some forms completely
break when using the translator. I’ve been born at NaN-NaN-NaN before, and
submitted completely blank forms that passed client validation but apparently
there’s no server validation.

I wonder if it’s this issue where the form gets the postal code but not the
rest and they happen to live at “the default” for that location. This could
explain their friend too.

~~~
tsukurimashou
hahaha the same happened to me, I also remember when I had to register for an
internet connection, I didn't have a Dutch bank account yet and my French IBAN
was too long. Simply removing the maximum character limit from the input field
was enough, and I was able to submit the form, they never asked anything and
accepted my long IBAN gladly. It was XS4all, so not the small ISP either.

~~~
DonHopkins
Karin Spaink has an awesome XS4ALL t-shirt:

Final Victory

Scientology - XS4ALL

0-4

[https://www.religionnewsblog.com/13053/scientology-0-xs4all-...](https://www.religionnewsblog.com/13053/scientology-0-xs4all-4)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karin_Spaink](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karin_Spaink)

------
arzel
Probably some group checking to see if their stolen credit cards are working,
by ordering pizza to this guys address.

~~~
djhworld
Reply All did a show about this [https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-
all/z3hgd2](https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/z3hgd2)

~~~
shalmanese
One theory they never covered in the show was that it could be a hedge fund
doing this to generate receipts so they can analyze sales velocity. That's
part of how the Luckin Coffee fraud was uncovered.

------
magic7s
Somewhere someone’s CI/CD pipeline is kicking off a test that completes an
order.

~~~
joshstrange
It makes me very interested as to what his address is, is it "123 Main St" or
some other common name? I mean at a past company we had a ton of data pointing
to our old office, places close by to our office, or home addresses of
employees for testing.

That said unless all these places (it appears to not just be 1) have the same
backend and the tests are run against each location I'm not sure if CI/CD is
the right answer.

It gave me a laugh for sure and reminded me the terror around kicking off a
job in our production clone (the only way to fully test some queries/processes
due to size and real-world data needed). We had scripts that wiped things like
phone numbers, emails, SSN, etc before it hit the clone but not all developers
where diligent about adding to the cleaning script when adding new fields to
the DB. My nightmare was sending out a batch of SMS/Emails to people alerting
them to an issue (the staleness of the data would fire off false alarms) that
didn't exist.

~~~
netsharc
Makes me want to live at Foobar St. 42...

------
Andrew_nenakhov
I wonder how long it took local pizza restaurants to figure out that this
address is problematic and flag it, refusing service? I'd tolerate no more
than 3 times. So, how many pizza restaurants are there in the area? 20? 50?
100? I don't know how this could last for years.

(That comes from an assumption that pizzas are not paid for in advance, which
the article kinda implies)

~~~
BiteCode_dev
Several possibilities I can imagine:

\- they don't handle ordering and delivery: those are outsourced, and so they
don't get the address. Or they do manage ordering, but not delivery, and the
ordering system has a bug.

\- they benefit from those fake sales because they are laundering money
through their restaurant

\- they benefit from those fake sales because they have an insurance that pays
for those

\- they are using those addresses, that they know don't cause problems, to
test something.

\- they use the pizza delivery as an excuse to be here, and do something
illegal (surveillance, delivering drugs, territorial presence, etc).

\- it's a fake/exagerated article/testimony

~~~
PakG1
That would be a lot of testing for the fourth option. :)

~~~
BiteCode_dev
Indeed.

But the testing may have nothing to do with the pizza business itself.

Maybe it's a way to do hiring.

Maybe they test delivery gears.

Maybe they test the time it takes to delivery using said vehicule on one
terrain.

Maybe they test the time it takes for some kind of product to be cold, or not
tasteful anymore.

A serious test must be down for a long time, accross terrains and seasons.

And if you test a lot of thing, you will need a lot of deliveries for a long
time.

------
neals
Reminds me about this Reply-all[0] episode about a mysterious $2 coke that is
orders at Domino's all over the USA:

[0] [https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-
all/z3hgd2](https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/z3hgd2)

~~~
egypturnash
Damn that is a hell of a story.

~~~
safetyfirstb
Reply All's "Super Tech Support" segment is amazing and full of these weird
tech issues. You should check them out if you haven't already. I can't
recommend them enough.

------
ashildr
If he was the only person receiving these deliveries I’d guess the most
probable explanation was completely unrelated to his person - a GPS coordinate
/ default value in some frequently used application or service. Or maybe
something similar like an erroneous lookup in a database that actually
contains his data, like somebody using production data in a database for
testing purposes. This would explain orders of 14 pizzas at once, which may be
a rare order size in production environments.

However, the fact that he seems to know a second person affected by this makes
it way more likely that this is in fact a personal attack.

------
pier25
> _“A friend of mine who lives in Herenthout is going through exactly the same
> thing as I am. She has been receiving pizza she has not ordered for nine
> years, too,” Van Landeghem said._

Either this problem is extremely common in Belgium, or this is a very
suspicious coincidence.

~~~
fragmede
It's possible there's code somewhere in the stack which sets a default, and
the fall through case in the code resulting in this real-life weirdness.

eg. [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/kansas-couple-
su...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/kansas-couple-sues-ip-
mapping-firm-for-turning-their-life-into-a-digital-hell/)

~~~
pier25
Sure, but it would be quite a coincidence that these defaults happen to two
people who happen to be friends.

------
mayneack
I wonder if he's at the geographic center of his city or postcode. Sometimes a
geocoding service will default to the center of an area if the address isn't
precise enough or if it's using IP address based geocoding.

It doesn't say if the orders actually have his address on them or just show
up.

Approximately a small scale version of this: [https://splinternews.com/how-an-
internet-mapping-glitch-turn...](https://splinternews.com/how-an-internet-
mapping-glitch-turned-a-random-kansas-f-1793856052)

~~~
netsharc
Maybe the people ordering are using IE4 and too modern Javascript on the
restaurants' site fail to return the correct address.

Luckily it's just pizza and not an artillery attack. I guess that'll happen
soon enough, military bomber dropping a bomb in a wrong location because the
soldier "ordering" the bombardment from the ground didn't update his app to
the latest version...

------
_ph_
A strange story. I cannot understand why the police isn't looking into it. At
minimum, there would be a credit card number for each order which could be
traced. There should be phone records. If this goes via a payment processor,
they should flag the addresses. The fact that the orders happen to two persons
in parallel basically rules out any randomness in the process.

~~~
kelnos
I doubt there are credit cards involved; the article mentions that he refuses
delivery each time so he's never had to pay for anything, so I assume they're
cash-on-delivery.

Europe doesn't do the credit card thing to the same degree as in the US; cash
purchases, especially for things like this, are much more the norm.

~~~
yiyus
It depends, Europe is quite diverse. For example, practically everything is
paid by card in the Netherlands, but cash is used in Spain. Although in these
covid times, everything has to be paid by card everywhere I know.

~~~
brnt
But in the Netherlands food (and other online purchases) are nearly
universally done with the local iDeal system. Germany and Belgium use Sofort,
and for Poland there a few parallel systems. France and I guess Spain CCs are
used.

Its varied.

~~~
rjsw
In my experience, French bank cards are debit cards not credit ones.

~~~
brnt
Ah, then there to whole Maestro/VPay vs MasterCard/Visa thing. With CC I mean
the latter, but its true they provide debit versions of those. My French bank
provide a proper credit-CC though.

------
helij
What if this is only an ad for frozen pizzas?

From the article:

“I only buy frozen pizzas from Colruyt or Aldi. I have never asked for them to
be delivered to my house,”

~~~
schwap
I'm wondering if this whole situation is the universe trying to show this poor
guy what good pizza is.

------
driverdan
This is really poor journalism. Where's the interviews with the restaurants
and police? Speculation from industry experts? Anything more would make this a
better article.

------
gregoriol
Wouldn't it take only a few minutes for the police to get the phone number(s)
and find out?

~~~
hyperman1
You're not a bad enough person to understand this wont work:

I've unfortunately known someone who had a psychic problem . If she thought
you'd crossed her for anything howvere minor, she'd harass you for years. She
always has a list of 20 or so victims.

She had a never-ending list of new friends, and was the most charming person
possible to them. She'd get invited home to them, or found some excuse to come
by. Then, when the new friend went to make e.g. some coffee, she'd borrow
their phone/computer/wifi/... , commit a few minor crimes like the ones in the
article, and by the time the coffee came she was back in the sofa and the new
friend was none the wiser. It would take a few months before the friend
catches on, at which she'd drop them like a stone and find some new friend to
suck dry.

Police knows her very well. Every 2 year or so she voluntarily commits herself
to a psychiatric institute, at which point the legal system backs off. After 2
weeks she leaves against docters advice and it all starts from 0.

~~~
joelvalleroy
"Mental disorder" in English :), psychics are the people who read your
fortune.

------
mattlondon
Could just be a geocoding issue? Some data bug in a database somewhere that
unfortunately ends up "redirecting" a load of addresses/postal codes etc to
this guys house?

~~~
minikites
There's story like this about a place in Kansas that acts like a "dead letter
office" for problematic geolocation queries.

[https://consumerist.com/2016/04/11/this-farm-in-kansas-is-
th...](https://consumerist.com/2016/04/11/this-farm-in-kansas-is-the-default-
address-for-all-american-internet-users/)

------
baby
I sometimes receive my neighbor's mail (199 instead of 119), and he does too.
One time I ordered pizza and it said it was delivered, but I never received
it. I'm wondering if he ate my pizza.

------
rkhassen9
Seems easy enough to catch the source of this prankster, if there is one. All
he’d have to do, is notify the restaurants in his delivery radius, give them
his address, tell them to never accept the order to this address. This alone
should stop the orders, but to catch the source, ask them to take the phone
number of the person placing the order, maybe to pretend to confirm the order,
the restaurant calls back the person placing the order, if the person answers,
give the # to the police.

------
BiteCode_dev
It may be a bot? Either one with a bug, or a way for the authors to kill some
competition?

The article doesn't say if the pizzas were ordered online or by phoning
directly the shops.

At the begining, the bot would not have been able to call, but I assume now
it's possible to make bots smart enough to handle pizza orders. It may even be
a nice way to train one.

------
jvanderbot
Reminds me of the couple that lives on a farm that is the default geolocation
for 600 million IP addresses. Their farm has been visited by authorities for a
long time.

[https://consumerist.com/2016/04/11/this-farm-in-kansas-is-
th...](https://consumerist.com/2016/04/11/this-farm-in-kansas-is-the-default-
address-for-all-american-internet-users/)

And in my work, we always know the direction to null island, because stray
robots will head right for it. I even thought about writing a short story
about all the stray / bugged out robots piling up on the seafloor near it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island)

------
arke_125
I think it might be a case of someone testing the delivery/ordering software
in production with real data instead of dummy data?

That would explain why it went on for years. The test data won't be updated
quickly and no one would flag it because it is not supposed to be a real
order.

~~~
ken
And the tester just happened to pick two friends, who live 20 miles apart in
different cities, who have never ordered from the restaurant? That is both a
remarkable coincidence, and a bizarre choice of test data.

~~~
Sevaris
Maybe the tester is a friend of theirs and he's been quietly fucking with them
for years?

------
unexaminedlife
I have a theory, which I hope is mostly wrong, and may or may not apply
directly to this particular situation. We always hear about the cases where
people from foreign countries are trolling celebrities or other high profile
people. Why should people with malicious intent stop there? Why shouldn't we
all consider ourselves a target of trolls? It only helps us lose faith in
society. I am under the impression one of the relatively NEW tactics of groups
(also why does it have to be groups and not angry individuals?) trying to
cause civil unrest is to simply target every human being so they will all turn
on one another, become hostile, and cause their own collapse.

------
lgregg
I keep getting amazon packages to my apartment from a former tenant. I try to
decline them but they sometimes get delivered while I'm not home. I can at
least put return to sender letters in mailboxes. How do you deal with boxes?

------
turboturbo
I have used several food delivery services in Belgium, and all of them require
upfront payment. Perhaps that’s why the restaurants didn’t blacklist his
address. But regardless, it’s a weird story that seems unlikely

------
darepublic
Can't this guy call all these delivery places and explain to them his
situation. Sure it's annoying but seems worth it given the circumstances

------
tvbuzz
I share the same name as a tv journalist and author.

After years of receiving emails and calls - I received an invitation to a
“Back from the Hamptons Cocktail Party” hosted by a now US Ambassador.

With the RVSP, I let the host know I was the other guy (we both worked in TV
at the time).

She insisted there was no mistake and the invite was for me.

Spent the evening partying up with Martha Stewart and many other celebs.

------
aaron695
It's two things, maybe he has an enemy.

Or a slightly more likely he's a crazy old man who's got a few wrong orders.
As you can tell by the fact his friend has as well.

Explains why no blacklist or why no police helping after 9 years.

There's no default value going on here. No one here ever wrote a web form or
used a map? Try and understand the Appp map Las Vegas issue, don't just rote
learn it.

------
LockAndLol
I'm confused... if everything is paid for, why doesn't he accept them? Is it
common for delivery services to deliver unpaid good?

And if he never orders pizza, can't he tell the pizza place to never deliver
to his address? If that's already been done then a sign on the door would help
a lot, no?

~~~
gus_massa
IANAL, but if someone else paid for it and you keep it, then it is almost
stealing.

~~~
LockAndLol
How would you then make the distinction between that and a gift?

------
achenatx
I was in the gmail beta so have a great first.last@gmail.com email address.
The name is an extremely common asian name (there are like 5 people with my
name in my town). I have gotten divorce papers to sign, okcupid account
signup, jims worm farm order confirmation/delivery etc.

------
social_quotient
It’s weird but I feel like with a little more info this would be a case for
Reddit to try and figure out.

~~~
lostlogin
This can go badly wrong though. It’s had impressive result too but the doxing
of innocent people has had catastrophic results.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/2r3d54/what_h...](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/2r3d54/what_happened_with_reddit_and_the_boston_marathon/)

~~~
Sevaris
I think at the very least, this is the kind of harmless situation that won't
turn into a Pizzagate kind of thing.
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory))

------
yumraj
Once I received a payment via PayPal, of a few hundred dollars.

Luckily, before I needed to do anything or call PayPal, the payee realized her
mistake and PayPal took the money out - they notified me. I can only imagine
how freaked out the payee must have been.. ;)

------
barbarbar
Wow - that is really weird that it has been going on for that many years. Also
strange that he had a friend who experienced the same problem. I suppose the
pizza shop should do more to avoid it.

------
lowdose
> A friend of mine who lives in Herenthout is going through exactly the same
> thing as I am. She has been receiving pizza she has not ordered for nine
> years, too.

That's rich, either she is in on it or they have common enemy.

~~~
gus_massa
Is she an old friend (like someone he meet in kindergarten) or a new friend
that he meet while discussing this (for example, after posting this in some
forum, he meet someone with the same problem and they become friends)?

------
coronadisaster
I tend to always use the same fake email and fake phone number in some
forms... it might cause issues similar to this, unfortunately.

------
runeks
I’ve heard of worse things happening to people

------
fardeem
Not gonna lie this is pretty funny. Hope the person actually ordering gets
their pizza.

------
yellowapple
I mean, I could go for some pizza and kebab right about now...

------
joyj2nd
As long as it is paid for I would not mind. I can't eat gluten, maybe they
could switch to gluten free pizza or sushi?

~~~
mytailorisrich
There are constant discussions on online security on HN, but do not forget
that accepting and eating food that way is a big security risk for your actual
health.

It's basically like knocking on a door at random and asking the person who
opens it to eat something you're giving them... Accepting sounds like playing
Russian roulette.

~~~
slim
It depends on your threat model. Unless you think someone wants to kill you,
the risk is so low that it makes sense to take it and get a free pizza

~~~
mytailorisrich
" _this risk is so low_ " is a leap of faith because you have no clue about
that unless it happens to you all the time (where do you live??). It is
playing Russian roulette by betting that the risk is low...

------
elcomet
That's crazy. It cannot possibly be one person harassing him, or this person
is a true sociopath.

I guess it could be a bug, in some common system that restaurants use to
register adresses ?

------
bjarneh
Seinfeld wants to kill him I guess...?

------
dennisy
How is this at the top spot?

------
steveharman
"stupid Flanders" (TM)

------
normalnorm
One of the victims is in love / obsessed with the other, and this is a
misguided attempt to stay in touch and have something unique in common.

------
ksec
Sorry but why is this on HN? I kept reading and I was expecting some
programming, off by one, Unicode, or whatever error that caused the problem.
Or Some online Credit Card Fraud operation that used Food Delivery as whatever
tools it may be.

But no, Nothing.

So again, why is this on HN? I am generally curious.

~~~
yesplorer
Because the guidelines allows it:

Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're _evidence of
some interesting new phenomenon._

I think this qualifies as interesting new phenomenon.

