It was just a ‘brushing scam’ where people receive unsolicited worthless items from a seller who then posts false customer reviews for a different expensive item to boost sales for it. The scam reviews then appeared to be light. I know a friend in Atlanta that received several of these mystery packages, all worthless junk. The whole scam thing didn’t reach the media until the seeds were sent and everyone thought that was scary.
The consensus is that brushing explains the seeds, but the writer of the article researched it pretty thoroughly and disagrees. He thinks what really happened is people ordered the seeds via Amazon and then forgot about their order and were surprised when the seeds arrived.
That sounds far fetched but guess what—when he contacted several people who reported receiving mystery seeds and had them pull up their Amazon purchase history, all of them had indeed placed an order and forgotten about it. In fact, one of the people was the gardener lady in England who got the ball rolling on the whole seed thing when she posted about it to her online gardening group. She too had forgotten about her order.
The writer is now hoping that more mystery seed recipients will see his article and contact him so he can have a bigger sample to test his theory. Maybe he’ll do a follow-up with the results.