She could have bought a thousand dresses with the drug money.
A couple in Austria were expecting a delivery of dresses from a retailer in the Netherlands but ended up with an additional 24,800 ecstasy pills.
An unnamed woman, 58, thought the purple tablets were “decorative pebbles,” police wrote in a statement, but her husband, 59, decided to bring the package back to their local post office in Linz when he suspected they might be stimulants.
“The originally planned cozy breakfast was quickly over and, to the horror of the couple, it turned out that though one of the packages did contain the two dresses, the second, however, had 24,800 Ecstasy tablets,” said Upper Austria police in a statement. “The (post) office was equally astonished, which is why the police, and subsequently the narcotics department of the City Police Command Linz, was informed.”
An investigation by Linz’s drug squad revealed the package was supposed to land in Scotland, CNN reported. Officers in Austria estimated that the parcel of pills was worth around €500,000 ($548,127) locally, but in the UK they’re valued at just £165,000 ($205,000), according to Police Scotland.
Drug dealers have long relied on lackadaisical postal screening to deliver goods. Earlier this year, a couple in Australia mistakenly signed for a package containing $10 million worth of meth. A 2018 report by the US Postal Service Office of Inspector General revealed that of 104 illicit drug retailers on the dark web that listed a preferred shipper, 92 percent said they used USPS.
Police Scotland and the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) are now working together on the case. Said an NCA spokesperson, “This is a live investigation and inquiries are ongoing.”
No arrests have been made at this time.