A Drug Cartel Is ‘Selling’ Lawn Decorations on Amazon to Hide Their Meth Shipments

Test time . If you ’re a professional drug marketer , what ’s your best-loved way to move product in and around the U.S. ? Is it …

A ) viacatapult , Bel ) deaddrops over a darken Arkansas corn field , orC ) load up the ol’Los Pollos Hermanosfry slugger bucketful ?

… Apparently the answer is D ) , none of the above . The substantial answer is : become a trafficker of decorative lawn stones for Amazon.com .

Photo: JIM WATSON/AFP (Getty Images)

Yes , accord to a recentreportfrom Forbes , professional crooks are squirreling their unconventional pharmaceutic products ( aka , meth ) into Amazon packages . To keep suspicion at embayment , the package are push as quotidian landscaping products . Using Amazon vender accounts , the dealers are then able to move their amplitude under the screening of the company ’s international merchant vessels services . Presumably the disguised items are shipped to overseas sidekick or wherever the next halt in the global trafficking journey is . So far , at least five vendor score have been flagged for having been potentially involved in such schemes , Forbes writes .

agent from the Union Homeland Security Investigations spot and Amazon late discovered that a “ ball-shaped narcotics organisation ” was behind the gambit . The method is being used to ravish multiple kilo of narcotics at one time , Forbes indite :

So far , police have seized two package from the suspicious vender story that contained “ bulk check substances . ” One was intercepted on October 28 by Customs and Border Protection in Louisville , Kentucky , before it could make its elbow room to its destination in Australia . It contained over 5 kilograms of methamphetamine . Three days later , on Halloween , Amazon and HSI agent in Michigan inspected a piece of ground claiming to contain pre - have slate stone for toy railroad line and garden pots . It contained nearly 6 kilograms of meth .

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It ’s sorta unclear whether the vender accounts involved are actually postulate in any lawful cut-rate sale , or are just using a front company to occasionally ship drug mask as products to their co - conspirators . There also is n’t really any information on how long this style has been go on or how prevailing it might be . We were curious as to whether Amazon had any further details and reached out for commentary . We will update this account if they reply .

This definitely is n’t the weird method that ’s ever been used to traffic drugs ( among other conception , see : narco - submarinesandfake carrot ) , but it is a pretty cunning way to abuse Amazon ’s gargantuan shipping meshwork and immense seller residential district to hide outlaw dispersion in plain mess .

Forbes cover that , along with Amazon and the HSI , the Justice Department office for the southerly district of California is lead the probe into the drug shipments . No word yet on whether they ’ve manage to track down the e - commerce Walter White who daydream up this perverse business architectural plan .

Ms 0528 Jocasta Vision Quest