Adrianne: Let me take a sip of water.

Regina: The suspense.

Billy: Is this a water related pitch?

Adrianne:  It’s about seeds.

Billy: I know where you’re going. 

Regina: Yeah, I know. I know where this is headed.

Adrianne: I first heard about this because I came across this tweet from the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development on August 1st, which says, 

REMINDER: IF YOU RECEIVED UNSOLICITED SEEDS IN THE MAIL, DO NOT OPEN OR PLANT THE SEEDS.

And then it’s a photo of what look like some innocent seeds in plastic bags next to mailers.

Billy: Right. And if I remember correctly, this sort of went everywhere.

Adrianne: Yeah.

News clips: Well some people are finding something in their mailbox they didn’t order: seeds. Officials are warning people to be on the lookout for these mysterious packages.

These clear packaged bags of unidentified seeds from China have been showing up in mailboxes of Michiganders causing major concern at the State Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.

Whatever you do, do not open these packets and plant these seeds. And because they’re coming from foreign countries, and these seeds are not permitted in the United States or in Louisiana, we’re going to really work hard to get to the bottom of this.

The state says it’s also unknown if the packages, which come in various shapes and sizes, could be intended to spread disease.

Woman: There’s so much crazy stuff going on in our world anymore and a lot of it’s coming from China. 

Adrianne: It tapped into a lot of paranoias during a time when people were feeling very emotionally sensitive.

John: Who’s planting unsolicited seeds without knowing what they are?

Adrianne: Oh, many people.

Regina: Oh, I don’t know. I think I might do it.

John: What? Why?

Regina: I mean, what’s going to happen?

John: It’s just like, not knowing if you’re planting a tree or a small plant or anything like…

Regina: Sure, but I’m going to plant it inside of my apartment and if it feels like…

John: What if it’s a huge tree? 

Regina: Then I’m gonna get rid of it. Like it’s not going to grow into a huge tree overnight.

Billy: Well, so in your apartment would be one thing, right? But it seems like the paranoia around it is if you plant them outside, correct?

Adrianne: The paranoia around it seems to be pretty comprehensive. So the agency in Michigan posted about it on its Facebook page and there are hundreds of comments from people saying “I got some seeds” or “I got multiple packets of seeds and I don’t know what they are” and posting pictures about them.

John: So this was happening in multiple states?

Adrianne: It was happening in multiple states and it was happening in Canada and it was happening in the EU and it was happening in Australia.

Here’s what you’re supposed to do. If you planted the seeds. This is from USDA:

If you already planted the seeds, remove the seeds or plants, and at least three inches of the surrounding soil and place in a plastic bag. 

Squeeze out the air and tightly seal the bag. 

Place the bag inside a second plastic bag, squeeze out the air and seal it tightly.

Put the bag in the municipal trash. 

Do not compost it. 

If you planted the seeds in reusable pods or containers, wash the plant and container with soap and water to remove any remaining dirt.

It’s important to wash the container over a sink or other container to catch the runoff. 

Put the runoff down the drain or flush down a toilet. 

Soak the clean planting container in a 10% bleach and water solution for 30 minutes.

John: What?

Regina: What?

Billy: Did they explain the reasoning for any of these steps?

Adrianne: So the basic reason is concern about invasive species or pests.

Billy: Right.

John: That’s extreme though.

Billy: It just is very, very aggressive.

Adrianne: The basic theory about what’s going on here is that it’s something called a brushing scam, which is where Amazon sellers will try to generate fake reviews. And in order to evade Amazon’s fraud detection systems, they have to actually ship something in order to get that verified purchase badge.

But that’s just the theory. There hasn’t been any presentation of evidence for this. A lot of the people pushing this theory don’t seem to really understand the details of how it works.

Billy: So this was a huge story. No one actually got to the bottom of what was going on?

Adrianne: No, we still don’t know what’s going on.

John: That’s really weird. 

Billy: It seems to be a pattern lately though. I think it’s just because the news moves so quickly and there’s so many big stories that normally someone would spend the time on this, but..

Adrianne: That’s how I was feeling about it like “Wait, go back to the mystery seeds.” The last thing USDA said about it was on August 12 and they basically just put out the instructions again for submitting reports. 

So then I talked to someone at the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, which posted this Facebook post and the tweet. They told me that they were kind of overwhelmed by calls about this from people who were really freaked out about these seeds. They sent me a spreadsheet of complaints that were officially filed with them. There were 674 complaints just in Michigan. I shared you all on it so you should be able to look at it.

Billy: Oh, wow. This is comprehensive. So these are the ones filed through the form that it links to?

Adrianne: Correct. So, if you look through these, you will see that they ask, “Have you ordered anything from an e-commerce site? If so, which one?” And people are saying Amazon eBay, Wish, a bunch of Wish is on here a lot. Wish is a super cheap e-commerce app, but most of them are Amazon.

John: All of these people seem to have ordered seeds at some point in time, months ago.

Billy: Oh, yeah.

Adrianne: Interesting. 

“I ordered morel spores, which have not arrived yet. The package I received said it contained earrings. There were no earrings, just a bag of seeds.”

So they ordered seeds, which hadn’t arrived, but they got a bag labeled earrings, but then it was seeds.

John: But not the seeds that they wanted.

Adrianne: Well, I don’t know

John: Hmm.

Adrianne: Here’s another comment. 

“I ordered vegetable seeds during the lockdown. The vegetable seeds never did arrive, but the seeds from China did, which I never considered planting. My husband and I have an agriculture business.”

 So again, ordered seeds, seeds came, did not consider planting the seeds that came.

Billy: Did these people say where they ordered the seeds from? Are these seeds ordered from Amazon?

Adrianne: They just wrote Amazon, yeah. Okay. Here’s another telling comment.

“If I had known these seeds were going to originate from China, I would not have purchased them from Amazon. Seeds were ordered mid March. They arrived sometime mid June. I’m still waiting on at least four other orders of seeds. We’ll burn them if they come.”

John: Wait, I’m really confused. Are these people saying that even if the seeds that they ordered arrive, they will get rid of them?

Adrianne: Yes.

John: Why?

Billy: Because their trust in seeds has been ruined.

Adrianne: I think it’s because they didn’t realize they were ordering from China.

Billy: Right.

John: But what’s the- I don’t understand the implication.

Adrianne: I mean, I think there’s probably a couple of things going on here that are being lumped into one phenomenon. It seems like some people ordered seeds, but did not realize the seeds were coming from China. Then other people did not order seeds and received seeds that were labeled as jewelry or something else. Then some people are just confused. 

Regina: Yeah.

Adrianne: Here’s one.

“I did not receive seeds. I received a suspicious package from China, with a spoon and a fork in it. I have no idea why they would send me a spoon and a fork. My concerns are that it is full of COVID.”

Billy: Eat it up, you dumb American.

Adrianne: My other favorite was someone who just wrote:

“I received some from some country I’ve never heard of also, A LOT.”

Regina: That’s a good one.

Adrianne: And then this one person wrote:

“I actually received a root in the mail with dirt from China. I immediately called the Northville Township Police.”

John: Not the same.

Adrianne: “There’s a case with officer Brown.”

Billy: Oh, officer Brown.

Regina: Oh, officer Brown.

Adrianne: “I touched the root, but immediately showered. Very concerned.”

John: Showered! Wash your hand. Showered.

Billy: Hey, it could spread. 

Have seeds that anyone has received been verified to be something that could be considered dangerous to plant?

Adrianne: So far, the USDA says it has identified 14 different types of seeds, including: mustard, cabbage, morning glory, mint, sage, rosemary, lavender, hibiscus, and roses.

John: These are all very common. 

Adrianne: Uh-huh.

John: There’s nothing invasive about any of these.

Adrianne: They have not found anything that poses a known threat. There was another theme, very obvious theme: 

“Because of COVID closing my local garden stores, I purchased seeds on Amazon. I guess not being able to buy seeds at the stores, COVID sent me to Amazon. We buy lots of things online, due to the pandemic and to our rural location. Normally my wife and I buy our seeds from stores, but this year during the pandemic, this area of the store was shut down.”

John: Is this just a thing that happens when you buy seeds online and no one has been doing it until now?

Regina: It’s really bad marketing because they don’t tell you where it comes from at all.

Adrianne: Yeah. So this is kind of my theory, I mean, like I said, I think there are a couple of things going on here. I think brushing is probably part of it, but this might be way off, but I’m kind of thinking, so you have a ton of people suddenly buying seeds online, this huge spike in demand for seeds online. There are a lot of regulations around importing seeds. You need a permit to import a bunch of these very common varieties that people are ordering. So imagine you’re a seller and you know this, and you don’t want your item to be seized by customs, maybe you label it as something else like jewelry, and you just assume the customer won’t care. Because there’ll be like, obviously this is not jewelry. This is seeds. I have just ordered seeds. My seeds have arrived. And you’re the consumer and you didn’t realize exactly who you were ordering from because Amazon’s website is very confusing and you get a package and it’s got Chinese lettering on it and you think, “Oh God, it’s some kind of agricultural terrorism.”

And then this tweet goes viral and you freak out even more. Then you take your seeds out to the concrete drive and smash them with a hammer.

Billy: So your theory is that, these were the seeds people wanted all along?

Adrianne: Yes. 

Anyway. So, I want to look at some of these sellers, see what’s going on with them, talk to some of the people who received seeds, talk to the USDA, see if we can get any closer to figuring out what actually happened.

Billy: Let’s all order seeds.

Adrianne: Let’s all order seeds.

John: We’ve been trying to get some plants.

Regina: It’s going to be awhile before they turn into anything.

Adrianne: If you want to plant, get a plant.

John: Yeah, I know what a seed is, Regina.

Regina: Yeah. God, John, I’m just saying, it seemed like you maybe were confused.

[music]

Regina: Coming up. Adrianne does some five-star reporting.

Adrianne: Hi everyone!

John & Billy: Hey Adrianne!

Adrianne: So I have some insights into the great seeds mystery of 2020.

Billy: Please.

Adrianne: So, first of all I almost immediately ran into a rival on this story. 

Billy: Oh no. 

Adrianne: Another reporter. 

Regina: Conan O’Brien? Rival podcaster?

Billy: It was Marc Maron, wasn’t it?

Adrianne: It was another reporter sniffing along the same trail. I found out because I filed a Freedom of Information Act Request with the state of Michigan and they emailed me back and said, “Dear Mr. Koebler and Ms. Jeffries, we have some additional questions about your FOIA request.” Jason Koebler from Motherboard had filed the exact same request.

Regina: Wow. 

Billy: So you filed independently?

Adrianne: Independently. Yeah.

Billy: For people who don’t know you, you and Jason know each other and have worked together.

Adrianne: Uh-huh 

Billy: And they lumped you together, not knowing, that’s so funny.

Adrianne: Yeah. So as soon as I saw this, I tweeted at him, “Jason, I need you to seeds and desist here.”

Regina: That’s very good.

Adrianne: When was it that we discovered we had filed the same FOIA request?

Jason Koebler: Uh, it’s when you tweeted at me, like a month ago, maybe and Emmanuel sent it to me, our mutual friend Emmanuel and I was like, “What is Adrianne’s angle here? What is she doing?”

Adrianne: That is Jason Koebler the editor-in-chief of Motherboard, which is the excellent tech reporting team over at VICE and Underunderstood has partnered with them before and Emanuel, who Jason mentioned is the managing editor of Motherboard.

John: I like that he sounds afraid of you.

Regina: What’s Adrianne’s angle here?

Adrianne: So not only had Jason filed this request in Michigan, he filed requests in all 50 States and Washington DC and Puerto Rico.

John: Oh my god.

Adrianne: And got back thousands of pages of documents from his public records requests and his big finding, which he wrote about over at Motherboard was that hundreds of people planted these seeds.

Billy: Oh, wow.

Jason Koebler: You know, probably the vast majority of the time, this is not going to be that big of a deal, but who knows? Like I got an email from someone after I wrote this article saying, “My neighbor got these seeds and he planted them and they’ve taken over his yard and they’re spreading into my yard.” It was just like a local neighbor drama. This guy was furious because he was like, “I told this dude not to plant the seeds and now they’re everywhere.” 

Adrianne: So Jason had the same feeling about the story that I did, which was that it seemed like there were some pieces missing.

Jason Koebler: But I guess I’m not satisfied. Are you satisfied?

Adrianne: I’m not satisfied. I wanted to go back to where the story started, so I called Don Robison who is the top seed official for the state of Indiana who was quoted in a bunch of the early media coverage.

Don Robison: It was in mid July, I actually was on my way back from vacation, and saw a tweet where somebody had said they were getting seeds from China that were marked as jewelry. And so I sent an email out to the board of the association of American seed control officials and they said that that just started within a day or two of that date in mid July and they were all getting reports of that. So, I put a tweet out saying if you’ve got that, contact me and you know a normal tweet for us, we’ll reach about 2000 people interact with it, this one was 34,000 people. At that point we knew, wow, this is much bigger. This is much bigger than what any of us thought.

Adrianne: So when this first started happening, what did you think was going on?

Don Robison: Well, it was, mid-COVID scare and there were a lot of different thoughts going around among the sea control officials. One of the thoughts was that this is something else from China that is going to, just get people scared. Some people thought it was actually a way to send noxious weeds and introduce diseases into the United States’ agriculture and gardening that we didn’t have before. And that was, maybe done by the Chinese government, with their help type thing.

Billy: So he’s saying that initially all of the assumptions were that this was some kind of deliberate attack from China? He seems like he’s trying to be sort of delicate in the way that he says that, but he’s also totally not being delicate in the way that he says that, like it’s a pretty bold claim.

Adrianne: Yeah. 

Don Robison: I think until the USDA APHIS really got involved and started talking about this brushing scam and actually when they first started talking about the brushing scam, that didn’t gain much traction among people that were getting the seeds. It was thought of as, “That’s an awful lot of seed to be sending out just to get some reviews.”

Adrianne: Don said that the seed complaints have basically stopped at this point, which he believes is due to all of the media attention.

Don Robison: It made national news. I mean, I was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle. What is that? 2000 miles away?

Adrianne: Don was great, but he is an expert on seeds, not e-commerce. So I really wanted to talk to someone who just knows Amazon inside and out.

Zack Franklin: My name is Zack I’m currently living in Bangkok, but before that was out in Shen Jen for four years.

Adrianne: This is Zack Franklin. He runs a company called AMZ Kung Fu. His whole job is advising these huge Chinese sellers on how to make even more money on Amazon.

Zack Franklin: I used to work at a company called Value Inc. which is very, very, very big. They used to be like one of the top five in all of Chinese e-commerce. And about once a day, I would get called into some meeting for some stupid stuff I had no interest in there like “Zack, do you think Americans would love these breast pumps for breastfeeding?” I’m like “Yo. I have no idea. I don’t have kids. I don’t breastfeed.” You know? But I think that Chinese sellers are really good about going by the data. They don’t really need to know what Americans think because what people are searching on, Amazon reveals that.

Adrianne: Apparently 45% of the sellers on Amazon’s US marketplace are based in China. That’s according to marketplace pulse, which is a very good trade publication about e-commerce. And reviews are really, really important to Amazon sellers.

Zack Franklin: Amazon sellers need a lot of reviews, like a lot of reviews in infinite amount.

Adrianne: Any amount of reviews needed has only gone up as Amazon has gotten more popular and taken steps like; combining all the global reviews for one product or just adding ratings where you can click five stars without actually typing anything.

Zack Franklin: You know, a couple of years ago, if you had a thousand reviews, you would be number one, page one. There’s no doubt about it. Now, you look at some categories and you have like, 20,000 reviews, everyone on the first page has like more than 20,000 reviews. Sometimes 50,000 reviews.

Adrianne: Real customers don’t really leave reviews. They only do so about 1% of the time, but they still really want to read reviews.

Zack Franklin: They say, “Oh, this one has 40,000 reviews. This one has three reviews. This one must be sh*” so they go with the 40,000 review one every time. So if you’re trying to launch a new product, it’s very, very hard without those reviews. Also, if they get like one bad review, it takes 20, 30, 40 reviews to make up for that.

I’ve walked into very big Chinese companies that are spending upwards of $300,400,000 a month on reviews. Reviews are life for these sellers.

Adrianne: And this is where brushing comes in. Like we said earlier, brushing is this scheme where someone uses dummy Amazon accounts to leave fake reviews. And in order for those reviews to show up as verified purchases on Amazon, the brusher needs to actually send something to a real address associated with their fake account.

John: So this is like just random addresses that someone in China could be picking to send product to?

Adrianne: Sure, well, it seems like it is so easy for them to get real addresses. If they’re selling dollar iPhone cases on Wish and someone orders one, they can just take that person’s address associated with a dummy Amazon account and then start sending stuff to them for brushing.

John: Okay.

Adrianne: But there are different types of brushing and it’s important to know the difference in order to understand what’s going on with these seeds. If you are a seller who’s in the fulfilled by Amazon group or FBA, that means you are sending your product to Amazon and then Amazon is storing it and shipping it out themselves when you get an order.

Adrianne: So brushing for FBA means you have to send the same item that you’re getting the review for because it’s coming from Amazon’s warehouse. But brushing for a fulfilled by merchant seller is a lot easier because it’s the seller who packages up the thing and mails it to you. That means the brusher can actually send whatever they want and tell Amazon that they sent the real product.

And because it’s not going to a real person, Amazon will never find out. If this all seems complicated and risky that’s because it is. Sellers who get caught, can get banned from Amazon and lose their entire livelihood overnight. Amazon sometimes doesn’t even provide an explanation. And they’ll just say “Your account is done bye.” But it’s worth it to these sellers, because like we said, reviews are everything to their business.

Zack Franklin: As far as the seeds, I really think it was like two or three stupid employees that decided, “Hey, you know, what’s like super light? Seeds!” And like this type of stupid stuff happens all the time. All the time in every company you’ve ever seen. 

I had once had an employee, I wasn’t managing him very carefully, he wrote the word organic because organic showed up on keyword research, but he didn’t realize that we didn’t have the USDA certification for organic products, he wasn’t aware of the legal stuff behind this. So we got a nice phone call from the FDA or USDA, and I had to pull all my products from everywhere to send them back and get them relabeled and send them in. And that costs, you know, tens of thousands of dollars. 

You know, some of these brushing companies are small, some of them are very big. But what would happen would probably be like one company would see another company’s shipping seeds and be like “Hey, that’s a great idea. That’s probably really cheap to ship.” Let’s do that too. You know, all these companies like to copy each other, you know, a million times.

So they see one person selling seeds. They’re like, “Hey, that’s probably pretty smart.” And then other ones probably jump in. And there are some of these companies that maybe do brushing that are probably very, very, very big so it doesn’t take like a vast conspiracy of tens of thousands of brushing companies to do this, it’s probably just two or three.

Adrianne: I am still waiting on USDA to tell me what their final number of reports of this happening in the U S was but it seems to be on the order of like less than a hundred thousand. Indiana got a thousand and this happened in all 50 States So you imagine it’s probably like 50 to a hundred thousand, is what I’m guessing.

They’ll come back to me as the people who reported it. So you assume the number of people received seeds is larger than the people who actually took the time to report it. Are we talking about, I mean, when you hear that number, does that sound like a handful of sellers to you?

Zack Franklin: No, this is not a handful of sellers, a handful of brushing companies.

Adrianne: So, this was kind of an “aha” moment for me. I had been thinking of sellers and brushers as being the same people, but in fact, they are slightly different overlapping ecosystems. The brushing agencies are being hired by the sellers and there are different tiers and different types of reviews at different levels of quality. Some sellers, only if they’re big enough may have their own brushing departments, but a lot of it seems to be these agencies that just specialize in brushing and then they get hired by the sellers.

Zack Franklin: The actual sellers themselves had no idea. Zero idea. They just go to a company that says, yes, we can provide reviews and they don’t ask questions. They just pay the money. So what you have are service provider companies, not individual sellers, that are doing this. At that level, it’s possible for several of these brushing companies, non-Amazon sellers to do big, big numbers.

All they need are a bunch of addresses. What they did is they probably talked with a bunch of Amazon sellers and said, “Hey, we have a new way to do this really cheap, like order a couple thousand reviews.” And it’s easy. I know companies that order thousands and thousands of reviews every month, a hundred thousand is not a bad number. It’s not out of the possibility.

Adrianne: So after I talked to Zack I actually got that number back from USDA. Do you all want to take a guess at how many seeds they collected?

Billy: So your guess was fifty to a hundred thousand based on-

Regina: Based on a thousand in Indiana, Yeah. 

John: But this got a lot more coverage than a normal spray would.

Regina: Said it was like 34,000 engagements, I think is what he said, right?

John: Let’s go with, let’s go with 500,000.

Regina: Well?

Adrianne: Anybody else?

Billy: I’m gonna say 300,000.

Adrianne: This is the statement from Mr. Osama El-Lissy who is the deputy administrator of the Plant Protection and Quarantine Program in the U.S department of agriculture’s animal and plant health inspection service also known as APHIS. 

“As of November sixth APHIS has collected 18,674 seed packets.”

Billy: Dang it.

John: We’re pretty high. 

Regina: Billy, you won though.

Billy: Oh right, in your face.

Adrianne: We have received more than 11,600 calls and emails from the public reporting, unsolicited seed packages or seeking related information. This all started in July so that’s 4,668 packets per month. I told Zack that number and he wrote back, “Yeah, honestly, that’s pretty small. Haha. Very easily, one company.”

Billy: I like how it started with Americans, assuming that this was some kind of nefarious government plot to poison the United States. And then, and then his explanation is that like, “Oh, this is just like some doofus in an office.”

Adrianne: Also told me that the official explanation is now split into two determinations. So there are the people who received seeds due to brushing, but then there are people who just ordered seeds and then didn’t realize they were coming from a foreign country. So the real number of brushing seed packets is even lower than that.

Zack had told me about this website that lists a bunch of Amazon seller forums. So I started lurking around on there, and these are translated by a combination of Google translate and deep L and my own judgment. So please take these translations with a grain of salt. This post is called “The mystery seed is back, Shenzhen cross border sellers actually sends parcels here.”

It starts by summarizing a wall street journal report about the seeds and then it goes into a translation of some Japanese news coverage that showed the same thing was happening there. And the Japanese were like, just as hysterical as we were, if not more hysterical. And people were calling it biological warfare saying that the seeds were highly toxic to humans and to native Japanese plants. It was definitely like the same kind of reaction that we had here.

This Chinese seller who’s writing about all of this wrote:

Dear cross-border e-commerce colleagues, 

If such development continues, conspiracy theories will continue to escalate and international public opinion is really bad for us. These packages have a very serious impact on our cross-border e-commerce industry. Reports in the local media and the internet have not only increased the inspection of logistics packages than ever before, but also have a huge negative impact on the brand image of the entire overseas products.

Dear sellers, 

You can no longer use sending seeds to brush orders, which may ruin the low operating routine of our entire industry. Everyone, please help forward this message. 

While I was searching for information about Amazon selling on Baidu, I kept coming across these really well-written posts by an Amazon seller who’s writing under the pseudonym Moss.

Moss: Hello! My name is Moss. I live in Shenzhen, China.

Adrianne: Shenzhen has the largest concentration of Amazon sellers in China. Estimates are between 400,000 and 600,000 sellers, just in that one area. I asked Moss if Amazon is popular in China and he said, no, Chinese people prefer to shop on Taobao or Jin dong or T-mall, which are the local domestic e-commerce sites. Amazon has less than 1% market share.

Moss: Just like when you mentioned Amazon in China, some people think you are talking about the rainforest.

Adrianne: I was hoping Moss would put me in touch with some of his brushing contacts, but he said, there’s no way they would talk to me.

Moss: It’s illegal in Amazon. Also it’s illegal in China, shua dan, brushing is illegal in China.

Adrianne: That is the Chinese word for brushing, shua dan, even though it’s illegal, Moss said  everybody on Amazon does it.

Moss: I should say at least 98% Chinese status are you involved in brushing, especially for some compatible department, just not electronics.

Adrianne: Moss explained that brushers will use cheap, lightweight products, stuff like sleep masks that they think Americans won’t try to return, or they won’t send anything at all. They’ll just bribe a manager at a shipping company to get a fake shipping label that will validate on Amazon. And then the addresses come from mostly real customers from these sellers, either through Amazon or eBay or Wish or one of these other platforms. And there’s one other way.

Moss: Brushers can use Facebook ads to collect addresses, they tell people on Facebook, “if you want to receive lots of free kits in the future, just leave your address.” So they can collect a lot.

Billy: Wait, so those actually work?

Regina: I mean, but you have no control over what you get. You just get whatever it is. You could get seeds, you could get, uh..

John: It seems great to me, I don’t know. Sign me up. 

Regina: You could get these sleep masks.

Billy: I’ve been stuck at home. Nothing exciting is happening here.

John: As someone who’s been inside my apartment for the last eight, nine months or whatever, it’s been, uh, the thrill of getting mail that has unexpected surprises seems great.

Adrianne: Actually, there is a type of review where you don’t just have to get random stuff. You can actually tell them what you want to get. These are called incentivized reviews and they’re a lot more expensive for sellers because it’s actual Americans or Europeans or Canadians leaving the reviews. How much does it cost for a fake review?

Moss: One review price depends on where they’re from. If you get a review from a brushing agency, uh, one review only costs you $5. If you get a review through paid and incentivized review agency, they’re costing you $10 and even more.

Adrianne: Incentivized reviews are different from brushing. I’m in a bunch of these groups on Facebook and the way it works is you say, “Hey, I’m an American, I have both a PayPal account and an Amazon account” and they will send you an absolutely huge list of products and say, “Do you like any of these? And you say “Yes, send me like this thing,” and they’ll say, “Okay, great. We will transfer the money to your PayPal. You will purchase this on Amazon. Then you will write a review.” And there’s kind of no accountability for you. So one of the forums that I’ve found-

John: You just take the stuff.

Adrianne: You could, you could just take the stuff and not write the review, or you could just take the money on PayPal.

John: You scam the scammers.

Adrianne: You scam the scammer. Yeah, because I came across this forum while I was looking at all of these Chinese Amazon seller forums that was dedicated to outing Americans on Facebook who have been screwing over these sellers. They post their names and their Facebook accounts and the experience.

And they’re like, “Yeah, this guy said he was going to write a review but he didn’t write the review.” or “Yeah, this person said they were going to write a review and then they wrote one, but then it disappeared.” or like, “This person never bought the product.” So they try to crowdsource that knowledge.

Regina: I kind of love that people scamming each other.

Adrianne: So then I asked him what he thought about the whole seeds thing.

Moss: So the seed is brushing. It is totally brushing scale.

Adrianne: Moss told me he doesn’t understand why Americans would think nearly 20,000 shipments is too many to be a brushing scam. He said he knows of an agency called 4 Million Stars that normally does 30,000 shipments a month. But he wouldn’t tell me if he knew anyone personally who had done this sort of thing.

Moss: It must be from agencies or from a big amnesty. It must be, but I don’t know which one.

Adrianne: I asked Moss if he thought there was some sudden change that would have caused Americans to receive seeds out of the blue. And he said, “No, not really. Except maybe that big Amazon sellers that are also doing brushing or brushing agencies would just have access to more seeds because seeds have been really popular on Amazon during this pandemic and they’re really good margin.”

He kept telling me seeds in China, they’re free. They’re so cheap. They’re basically free.

Moss: Seeds are free.

Adrianne: And that meant it was really good business until Amazon stopped all that.

John: Oh, did they crack down?

Adrianne: So Amazon’s got a bunch of heat about this whole thing and there was a member of Congress in Kentucky. Who’s on the house oversight committee who sent threatening letters to Amazon and eBay and Alibaba.

In September, Amazon announced that it was banning foreign sales of seeds in the US. Of course, that just punishes the legitimate sellers. 

John: Right.

Adrianne: So I reached out to Amazon about this, of course, and they reiterated what they told other reporters, which was that they investigated, and this was not brushing nothing to see here. I told that to Moss and that’s how I finally got him to tell me why he was so sure this was all a brushing scam. 

Amazon says the seeds were not related to brushing on Amazon but they lie all the time.

Moss: Yeah. Yes. I think it’s, I have a friend who is a big seller, but I cannot tell you their names. He sent lots of seeds into the United States for brushing.

Adrianne: Oh really.

Moss: So Amazon lied, yeah.

Adrianne: Okay. Now we know.

Regina: Wait, what?

Billy: He’s got a seed brushing source.

Regina: Wait, didn’t he say before he couldn’t speak specifically?

Adrianne: Yes, I kind of, he kind of like, it was kind of like he asked me three times.

Moss: Russia cannot ship empty packages so they  choose to ship seeds because this is almost free in China.

Adrianne: Brushers can’t ship empty packages, seeds are light and almost free. So brushers used seeds for brushing. He says more and more Americans are giving their addresses away, online and exchange for free stuff. So it’s not that Americans don’t like getting random stuff in the mail. It’s just that they don’t like getting random seeds in the mail. 

I feel way better about this explanation now that I’ve heard it from an actual Chinese Amazon seller and not from these agencies that were unable to produce any evidence for this claim. 

Okay. Here’s what I think is actually going on with these seeds. It’s a couple of things: one, a lot of people ordered seeds for the first time in March, and didn’t realize those seeds would be coming from a foreign country. So when packages started to arrive from China and these other places, they were surprised. Then they saw this media coverage that made it seem like it was potentially this big conspiracy and they got more freaked out. 

Two, some of the seeds were sent as part of a brushing scam on Amazon to gin up fake reviews, but the number of seeds that were sent for this purpose were in the thousands per month. That’s what some individual brushing agency could do in a week so it’s really not that many and doesn’t indicate anything unusual or new or coordinated. Seeds are cheap so it was the perfect item to send out until, three, brushers started to realize that seeds were getting a lot of attention, which they don’t want, so they stopped sending the seeds.

That, and the fact that these seeds were tested and turned out to be mostly harmless, are the reasons that this story disappeared from the news without a satisfactory, full explanation. And because it’s 2020, and in 2020, there are so many things to pay attention to.

So I called Jason back and I told him about how brushing is this huge industry and how numbers that seem big to Americans may not seem so impressive in China. 

Adrianne: So like in Shenzhen, there are entire subway stops where everyone living there is an Amazon seller and all the ads in the subway are for super specific Amazon seller tools.

Jason: Right, I went to Shenzhen for one day and I got off at a specific subway stop and all of the ads in the subway were four types of iPhone screws, which I thought was very interesting. So I believe this like 1000%, it was very wild.

Adrianne: I also told him Zack’s theory about how the whole thing could have been started by one or two bozo employees.

Zack: There’s a whole brushing industry, it makes a lot of sense, the idea that they would copy each other makes a lot of sense. The idea that they would then freak out when we started freaking out, it makes a lot of sense, that all tracks to me.

Adrianne: And then I told him what Moss said that he had firsthand knowledge of a seller in China who was sending seeds to the US for brushing on Amazon.

Zack: That’s great. No, I think you’ve cracked it.

John: Thanks for listening to the show, Underunderstood is Adrian Jeffriess, Regina Dellea, Billy Disney and me John Lagomarsino. 

Adrianne: Special, thanks to Yiwei Tian, who provided translation help for this episode.

Regina: And a very special thanks to our Patreon subscribers who get access to our Discord and our bonus podcast Overunderstood.

Billy: We are taking the week off for the holiday, but we will be right back in your feeds the following week on December 8th. In the meantime, if you wanted to help us out, you could leave a nice review on Apple Oodcasts, even if you don’t use that to listen to podcasts. Otherwise, you know, we might have to resort to brushing.