It is associated with a certain risk to store hard drugs and weapons.
But criminals have now found a creative solution to this.
The delivery company Dao tells Jyllands-Posten that the company is being exploited as an involuntary warehouse and that there is very little they can do about it.
In Denmark, you can send and receive packages completely anonymously. It only requires a phone number and an email address to send a package with, for example, Dao. And if the criminals use a fake email address, a prepaid phone card, and some cash, they can anonymously drop off packages with weapons or drugs and send the goods through Dao’s system.
The packages can circulate within Dao for weeks, and eventually, the original sender can retrieve the package, repackage it, and drop it off again. This way, the criminal avoids having to store the illegal items themselves.
When a person sends a package with Dao, it is sent to a recipient – who can be fictitious – for pickup at a package shop. It lies there along with regular shipments while Dao sends three reminders to the recipient. If it is not picked up, it is sent back to the person, who also receives three reminders.
Only if the package is not picked up by the sender or if it gets damaged is it inspected by Dao. This happens at a distribution center in Fredericia, where the company’s clarification department is located. Here, the packages are repaired or opened if they have not been picked up after three months.
Christian Roland, who is head of Transport and Terminals at Dao, says they most often encounter illegal goods if a package gets damaged and it becomes clear that it contains, for example, narcotics.
Must not inspect packages
Among the damaged or unclaimed packages, Dao has found hard drugs, hash, opioid pills, and loaded weapons. One package, from which white powder was spilling, turned out to contain 6.6 kilos of cocaine.
Dao is not allowed to check what even the most suspicious packages contain. The postal law dictates mail secrecy, which means there are very restrictive rules for when Dao can open or scan a package.
SF proposed a resolution in the spring to require all package distributors to use technology to scan packages for fake goods, narcotics, and other illegal items.
Karina Lorentzen, who is the party’s legal spokesperson, believes that it is a »low-hanging fruit« in the fight against drug trafficking to remove some of the thousands of packages with narcotics that are sent by post.
»But it requires that the authorities, namely the police, the Tax Agency, and the Ministry of Transport, organize it so that the packages found can be handled and the drugs destroyed«, she says.
Her resolution resulted in the government setting up a working group to look at the extent of the problem and possible solutions. That group is still working.
The transport spokesperson of Konservative, Joachim Hoffmann-Petersen, believes that the police, Ministry of Justice, and Ministry of Transport are responsible for finding solutions.
»It is totally unacceptable that package distributors are being used as hubs and depots for criminals, and something must be done about it. But there is, of course, a certain balance in this. I think it will be technologically possible to require ID for package drop-offs within a few years, but then all law-abiding citizens will have to go through it every single time«, he says.
This summer, Dao was visited by the parliamentary legal committee, which came to hear about the challenges of handling illegal shipments. Since then, the company has had a good collaboration with South Jutland Police, who take over the illegal packages when Dao has discovered them, says Christian Roland.
