Russian ecommerce hack tricks post-office in US/Canada

This is an interesting article posted on boingboing.net by Cory Doctorow several time ago.

Here's a fascinating hack used by Russian netizens to trick e-commerce stores into delivering US/Canada-only merchandise to them in Russia: It’s no secret that many bigger shops use electronic systems processing orders. So in order to see if this address is in USA or Canada it uses ZIP code, state or province name and words “USA” or “CANADA”.

So what was possible to do is to put totally Russian address in the order delivery form, like: Moscow, Lenin St. 20, Russia in the address fields, usually there is a plenty of space to enter long things like this, and in the field country they put Canada in the field ZIP code – Canadian zip code.

What happens next? The parcel travels to Canada, to the area to which the specified ZIP code belongs and there postal workers just see it’s not a Canadian address but Russian. They consider it to be some sort of mistake and forward it further, to Russia.

Here is a sample parcel that a guy in Russia got this way.

Guys at Canadian post stroke out the words “CANADA” and Canadian zip code, wrote RUSSIA and forwarded the parcel further.

People say this trick works perfectly, but warn not to order expensive things way like this because there are some risks that a parcel would be returned, though this method is perfect for different free merchandise that companies give out to USA and Canada citizens.