When Lauren Legakis saw on Instagram last week that a handful of prescription drugs had been mailed to a shop in the Richmond, it felt like déjà vu.
She flashed back to 2020, when she opened a yellow envelope marked “return to sender” to her small store, Sockshop Haight Street. Inside she found a pair of white Hanes socks and an invoice with her store’s logo. This was all very odd, as her store carries mostly vibrant-colored socks with catchphrases and art printed on them, not Hanes — plus, Legakis had not mailed the package.
But it was what she had found inside the socks that led Legakis to call the police: 46 pink pills — vacuum sealed and pressed with numbers indicating their dosage.
Judging by the inscriptions, the San Francisco Police Department estimated the pills to be varying doses of amphetamines, often used to treat ADHD.
Four years later in September 2024, Legakis again received the similar “return to sender” package, this time with 12 pills. Again the envelope contained a fabricated invoice, complete with the store’s logo, street address, and an itemized receipt.
At the bottom of both invoices, the sender encouraged a review on their website, without specifying the site’s url. And then there was a final cryptic message:
“Flap flap! Stay Safe ☺”
These are the kinds of details you don’t forget. So when Legakis saw last week that Jamie Alexander, the owner of Park Life, a similar gift store in the Inner Richmond, had received a very similar delivery, she was flummoxed.
Alexander’s story was nearly identical. Last week, he opened a returned envelope addressed to Park Life and found an invoice with his store’s branding for what looked like a legitimate order. Only the product contained in the package was actually 22 pills. Like Legakis’, the invoice in Alexander’s package contained the same “Flap flap! Stay Safe” message.
“I saw the label on it that hadn’t originated from Park Life, but it had our branding on it, which looked like it was pulled off our website,” Alexander said. “After talking to my employees and just being perplexed we [realized] ‘Oh shit somebody is using our identity to traffic illicit drugs.”
It appears the Park Life package was only returned because the sender used an address in Austin, Texas, without a mailbox, so the parcel was returned to the store.
“I always thought they just targeted us because it’s easy to stuff pills in socks,” Legakis said. Now it seems her store is one of many. “I guess [they’re] targeting small businesses.”
The San Francisco Police Department confirmed that Legakis filed reports after each incident but declined to comment on whether it had seen similar scenarios before. Alexander said he did not file a police report, but did contact the United States Postal Inspection Service.
Matt Norfleet, a postal inspector for the United States Postal Service, said these parcels are often the result of people mailing contraband and using a local business’s return address rather than their real return address. When the mail is undeliverable, the contraband can make its way back to the shop.
Norfleet added that drugs inside mail parcels get intercepted “every day” in San Francisco and pills that may appear to be low-dose amphetamines — like those found by Alexander and Legakis — when tested, can end up being lethal.
“It’s a full-time assignment, pulling and destroying drugs,” he said. “A lot of what we see is drugs billed as one thing — MDMA or some party drugs — and it’s usually just fentanyl. This is why the crime is dangerous. Even if the people buying and selling the substances can take the risk, they’re exposing people who never had any desire to be involved in the transaction to these substances.”
Norfleet declined to comment on whether the USPS had seen the “Flap flap! Stay Safe ☺” signature before.
While the meaning of this cryptic signature, or where it originates from, is unclear, when the photo is applied under Google Lens, it routes to FuzyDuck.com, a website that sells prescription drugs in quantities from 10 up to 200.
A support email on the website did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Other store owners in California say they received similar packages that fit the pattern — false return-to-sender address with drugs inside.
The same thing happened to Alison Ables, who owns a boutique in Los Angeles. In 2018, a “return to sender” package arrived at the shop’s front door with roughly a pound of marijuana inside, along with an invoice and a fabricated logo. The parcel, which Ables said she ended up giving to a friend of hers, was bound for a state where the drug was not yet legal. She did not recall whether it was fitted with the same message as the parcels Alexander and Legakis received.
Daniel Sant, who works at Super 7, a store in the Mission that sells action figures and Japanese-style art and clothing, said a package that arrived in February 2023 contained what looked to him like black tar heroin. Two weeks later, the store’s San Diego location received a shoe box filled with four bags of marijuana.
Although there was no fake invoice, both situations involved someone using the store’s return address.
Sant said he tried multiple times to report the drugs to SFPD, but was always told that no officers were available to deal with them, so the parcel has sat in the store’s safe for more than two years.
“We opened it, and we were like what the hell? Like this is insane,” Sant said.
Anyone with information about these packages is asked to contact the SFPD at 415-575-4444 or text a tip to TIP411 and begin the message with SFPD. You may remain anonymous.