Teenager Opens Amazon Parcel, Finds ‘Help Me’ Message

By James Burke
December 5, 2017 6:12 am Last Updated: December 5, 2017 7:30 am
Amazon boxes (Sean Gallup/Getty Images) and Kim Dorsett’s photo of the invoice with the message that she sent to Amazon. (Kim Dorsett/Facebook)

A teenager in the UK discovered a ‘help me’ message in her Amazon parcel that claimed the bosses at the online retailer’s recruitment agency are ‘evil.’

The parents of April Dorsett, 13, ordered a gift from Amazon and organized for a note on the invoice to read ‘love from mum and dad.’

But when it arrived at their house in the town of Bolton, northwest England, it instead read, “Help me please, PMP staff are evil.”

Part of the Cordant Group which was established in 1957, PMP are Amazon’s recruitment agency in the UK.

Needless to say April’s parents, Kim and Philip Dorsett, were surprised by what was scrawled on the invoice.

Kim Dorsett told the Mirror that her husband ordered the present, “He ordered a note in it saying ‘love from mum and dad.’

“We asked April ‘have you read the note?’ and she said ‘do you mean this one?’

“That’s when we saw it. I thought ‘this isn’t right.’”

‘Then I thought it must be a prank and I was overreacting, but then people pointed out all the stories about Amazon lately,” Kim said, presumably referring to a recent investigative report about staff being worked to exhaustion levels to meet targets at Amazon’s newest warehouse in Essex.

“This is quite worrying. It’s the sort of thing you hear about happening in sweatshops in China,” she said.

Kim also sent a photo of the invoice and its message to Amazon via Facebook.

‘My 13-year-old daughter received her advent calendar today from her dad. She was all excited to open it because it was addressed to her,” wrote Kim.

“She found this inside of her box and is worried Amazon are running sweat shops. I’ve told her it’s probably a prank but can you just confirm this Amazon,” she wrote.

Kim soon got a reply.

“Oh no! I am so sorry your daughter received this note in her package, Kim. We’d like for our team to look into this for you,” replied Amazon customer support person named Aisha who asked Kim to fill out a form.

Amazon’s recruitment agency PMP—who are the one’s mentioned in the note as being ‘evil’—refuted the anonymous claim.

“[We] do not recognize the comment made as being an accurate or fair representation of the employee experience we provide,” said part of a reply from PMP to the Daily Mail.

“We do, however, take such comments extremely seriously and will be investigating in conjunction with our client.”

The note in the teenager’s Christmas present comes a few years after a widely-reported incident of a women in the U.S. finding a note exposing forced labor in China.

In 2012, Julie Keith from Oregon opened a Halloween kit she bought from a Kmart store to find inside a help message from a Chinese prisoner of conscience.

“If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization,” said the handwritten note in English written in a labor camp. “Thousands people here who are under the persicution [sic] of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever.”

The writer of the letter was later found to be a Falun Gong practitioner by the name of Sun Yi who had been detained for four years because of his faith. To avoid further persecution, Sun Yi later fled China. He ended up meeting Julie Keith last year in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Labor camps were officially abolished in China in 2013, but human rights observers noted the regime still uses prisons, detention centers, mental health centers, and unofficial “black jails” for the very same purposes.


With reporting by Petr Svab.

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