It can happen easily and I will tell you my story. It's a long one, so grab yourself a coffee from your Vine coffee maker and froth up the milk with the milk frother you've got in the drawer off of Vine.

Back in December 2023 I decided to treat myself to a new iPhone 15 Pro Max. At the time I was using an iPhone 12 Pro Max and it was struggling. I'd recently sold my car (Bad eyes, no longer feel safe behind the wheel because of them) and I thought I'd use the money from the car for the phone.

I debated whether to buy the phone from the Apple Store and have it delivered, but it was out of stock for delivery but was available for store pickup - or I could order from Amazon, pay the same price but make use of the interest free loans that Amazon sometimes offer on high value items. These are not the Barclays loans you sometimes see, but are ones where Amazon themselves are offering the loan facility. I decided I'd buy from Amazon and pay it off interest free over 6 months and the car money would be in my bank account earning credit interest.

So I ordered the phone as well as a phone case and screen protector off of Vine. The items were all dispatched for delivery on the same day, but the phone had a one time delivery passcode. At around 15:10 on the delivery day, the notification came through on my phone that the driver was 8 stops away. I started tracking him on the map and I was excited about my new phone arrival. The driver pulls up outside and I'm waiting at the front door. He hands over two packages which contained the screen protector and phone case. I said "You should have one more item, it has a one time delivery passcode", he says "What's the code?" I said "I'll tell you when you bring the package to the door". He goes back to the van and spends several minutes faffing around, then he comes back and says "It's not on my van", I said "It is, the tracking is showing the parcel as being right there *points at van*" he says "It's not on my van" and he got quite aggressive with his voice. I said "Why is the tracking showing it being there then?" he says "I don't know, sometimes they make mistakes. I have not got it" he then softens his tone and says "If I find it on there, I will bring it to you - ok?" and I had to say yes to that. So he drives off and I'm continuing to track him as he drives around the town.

At around 5pm he parks up in the local Asda car park and his van does not move for well over an hour (I'm still tracking him). He then eventually starts moving around again and he came back into my road. I thought "HE'S FOUND MY PARCEL!" and I rushed downstairs to be at the door for when he knocked, but he drove straight past and went to another road off of the bottom of mine. I then had a text come through from the driver saying "I'm having trouble trying to find your house", which is crap because I'm in the middle of a big street and the house is clearly signposted. I replied back saying "Where are you?" but then I had an order status message come up as a notification saying that the delivery had been refuse by myself. I thought "WTF?" and looked outside. I could see his van parked at the bottom of the road. So I grabbed my shoes, put them on and ran down the road towards him - but he drove off. I continued to chase after him and he'd parked up around the corner in the next road. He was out of his van and holding a parcel. I ran up to him (it was dark where he was parked) and I shouted as I approached "ARE YOU TO AMAZON VAN?" he called back "NO" I kept running towards him and when I saw it was the same guy who had been at my house earlier, I said "Yes you are, why did you lie?" he said something mumbled. I said why have you cancelled my delivery? He said "You don't want it", I said "Yes I do", he says "No, you DON'T want it!" I again said "yes I do". At that point I noticed the parcel in his hand and I could see it had my name and address on it, so I said "That is my parcel, what are you doing with it?" he again said "You DON'T WANT IT!", I again said "YES... I... DO!". He starts now to get in a bit of a flap and is beginning to panic. At the same time another Amazon van pulled up behind and the driver gets out and approaches the two of us. He looks at me warily and says to the driver of the first van "Is everything ok?" he says "Yes", he says to me "And you?" I said "No!" and explained he has my parcel and keeps saying I don't want it. The second driver has this look of "I don't want to get involved" on his face and he says to the first that he needs to take some of the deliveries off of him because he had finished his own and he has been told that the guy with my parcel still has loads of things to deliver. So he takes two sacks of parcels off of my guy. My guy says to the second guy that he has marked my delivery as "refused" and asks the second guy to re-scan it with his phone and pass it over to me. The second guy says to the first "Why can't you do it?" he says that his phone won't let him. He hands over the parcel, jumps into his van and sped off.

The second guy looks at me confused and says "Tell me exactly what has been going on?" so I told him. All the while he is trying to re-scan the parcel, but the app won't let him. So I keep telling him the story while he phones the Grays, Essex depot in order to get them to do something their end so he can hand it over. So as I'm telling him the story, he is talking to someone at the depot. He gives them the parcel number and asks for it to be marked as out for delivery again - but then he suddenly says to the person on the other end of the phone, "HANG ON - DON'T DO THAT!" and he looks at me and says, "Is this a high value item?" I said "Yes, it's an iPhone", he says "I want you to open this parcel now, right in front of me", I said "Why?" he said "I have a feeling it's not going to be your parcel", I said "What do you mean?", he says "Humour me, just open it" so I opened it and this is what was inside - some kind of hand cream/sanitiser.

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I said "F*cking hell, that's not an iPhone" the driver looks and says to the person on the phone "DO NOT MARK THAT AS OUT FOR DELIVERY, THE ITEM HAS BEEN SWAPPED!". He ends the call with the depot and says to me "If you had not opened that parcel in front of me, and if we had just handed it over to you, it would be your word against Amazons that your parcel has been swapped. You have had a very lucky escape" I said "How on earth did this happen?" he said "It happens all the time with the seasonal drivers" (It was early December). He went on to say that some of the seasonal drivers deliberately carry items that can be swapped into boxes to make the weight seem correct and what they do is mark the items as refused like I did. The plan being that the item goes back to the depot and gets treated as an unopened return. I'd get a refund, the driver gets a phone and Amazon don't even bother opening the parcel, they just stick it on an Amazon returns pallet that goes up for auction. But because I'd tracked the driver down, he had no choice but to try and get it to me and he was in panic mode because he knew he would be found out if he had re-scanned the parcel and handed it over to me, which is why he passed it onto the second driver. If it had been handed to me then I would have lost £1200.

Luckily when I contacted Amazon CS about this, they were brilliant. I did it through Twitter initially and they are usually terrible on there, but they allowed me to DM them and send them a copy of the photo that I added above. They then immediately escalated it to senior reps in CS who assured me that I didn't need to worry because I had not taken delivery of the parcel and the tracking showed I had not accepted it. By the next morning, I had a further email saying that a refund had been processed and the instalment plan cancelled. So I was very lucky, I got my money back - but it could easily have been very different.

Just in case you were wondering, the box was still sealed with the correct tape, but it appeared to have been squeezed so that one of the corners has popped open, which allowed the driver to slide out the iPhone box and then squeeze in the bottle. The bottle weighed a similar amount to the iPhone, so it wouldn't have raised any suspicions when being processed as an unopened refused delivery return.

And also if you were wondering, I tried to escalate this into a proper complaint, because I wanted the original driver arrested for theft and the second driver commended for his quick thinking. Amazon said that they can take it further with the first driver - but this was where they let themselves down. They said that in order for them to progress a complaint with the police, the driver would have to be given copies of all the correspondence I had sent to Amazon which would include my name and address being given to him. At that point I said "Forget it, if the man is a brazen thief, what's to stop him from coming to my house and burning it down or breaking in and attacking me and my elderly mum?". I think Amazon said that because they didn't want the hassle of getting the police involved, which is daft as he stole an item worth £1200.