One Preston man was left baffled this week after a bong turned up unexplained in the post.
AdvertisementConor Callaghan, who works in Preston, was scratching his head after Amazon sent him the filtration device he never ordered.
Conor said: “So on Sunday evening I’m checking my emails and notice one from Amazon. ‘Your package has been dispatched’.
“I’m thinking ‘What?’, I hadn’t even been on Amazon in the last week, let alone order anything. I’m even more confused when I see the item ordered is a bong. I don’t think it’s a scam at the time because it’s being delivered to my name, to my address, from my Amazon account. Nobody else has benefited from this.
“Then it starts to click.
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“The time it was ordered was 8:15pm on Saturday, when my sister’s (Tabitha, or Bitsy) end of exams party was going on, and I was out of the house. So it begins to look like it has been ordered then, which still makes no sense because the account is password locked and no home computer had been on Amazon according to the history.
“But then the final penny drops. Sitting in the kitchen, logged in to my Amazon account… Alexa.
“One of them has said ‘Alexa: Buy me a bong’ and Alexa has ordered it to arrive the next day. Bitsy investigated to confirm one of the lads at the party had made the order through Alexa.”
Amazon Alexa is a voice recognition device with various features including Google search, planning your calendar and, yes, ordering products from Amazon.
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Tabitha Callaghan said: “I asked a mate who did a bit of asking around people from the party and they told me a name of someone who had been up to something.
“At first we thought they had been sneaking round the house and logging on to computers, but they revealed that they had actually asked Alexa to buy it.”