The Nashville Flippers specialize in reselling a wide variety of items. The duo got a big box of unclaimed mail that sells for $120 and were overwhelmed with how many unopened bags and boxes were inside. Solorio and his brother-in-law Dustin Johnson opened each of the mystery packages on their YouTube channel.
“You don’t know what you’re getting. You could be getting somebody’s underwear,” said Solorio. “It’s very risky.”
It’s legal to buy unclaimed and lost mail. The U. S. Postal Service has its own “lost and found department” in Atlanta called the Mail Recovery Center. It gets about 67 million items a year and works to reunite lost letters and packages with either the recipient or sender. But sometimes all efforts fail and after 90 days the bags and boxes are auctioned off in bulk by the postal service. Many of the packages are bought in pallets by GovDeals.com or Liquidation.com.
“These companies bid on this stuff and they don’t even know what it is. They’ll either keep it and sell it off or they’ll sell it off to people like us,” said Solorio.