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In July 2020, social media users began circulating a warning from the Washington State Department of Agriculture about people in the U.S. receiving unsolicited mailings of seeds sent from China (sometimes in packages identifying the contents as jewelry), which included a caution for recipients not to plant any seeds so received and to report them to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) as instances of agricultural smuggling: This warning corresponded to multiple other governmental alerts and news accounts about persons in the UK and multiple states of the U.S. having received such unsolicited mailings. The Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (VDACS), for example, issued a similar warning to residents of that state: Newsweek also reported on residents of Utah receiving the same type of unsolicited packages: Less certain is the purpose behind the mailings. Explanations from drug smuggling to attempts to trick Americans into planting harmful invasive species have been mooted, although a somewhat different motive has also been suggested: Better Business Bureau's Jane Rupp has another theory. She thinks it could simply be a scam relating to customer reviews, in which companies post low-cost items so they can write fake reviews for their business in a resident's name. As U.S. News & World Report explained, the Fake Listing Scam is employed by disreputable sellers on sites such as Amazon.com, as they attempt to build up false reputations as reliable vendors in order to facilitate luring victims to their scams: At this juncture it appears true that the mysterious mailings of seeds sent with return addresses in China are real, but the specific motive behind them is as yet unknown.
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