Young man finds live scorpion inside Shein package

A student in the United Kingdom was shocked when she opened an order package she received from the fashion company Shein: inside there was a scorpion.

“I thought it was a toy – and then it started moving,” said Sofia Alonso-Mossinger. She said the experience was “pretty scary.”

With his roommates’ friend at the University of Bristol, the scorpion was placed in a bathtub and was later removed by a specialist.

Shein, a company based in China, was approached by the press and said it is investigating the incident.

The electronics engineering student said: “I opened the outer package and saw something moving. And I was thinking ‘what is that’?”

After realizing it was a scorpion, 18-year-old Alonso-Mossinger closed the package again, which contained a pair of boots. She took the package out of her room and contacted her colleagues.

“I thought I was dreaming,” she said. “I’m fine with spiders and stuff like that, but it was really scary to be in my room with a random scorpion.”

Phoebe Hunt, 18, said she heard screams and ran to talk to her colleague, who had found “a live scorpion in a package with her boots”.

“At first, being honest, I suggested that we should kill him, but everyone said that wouldn’t be the most humane thing to do, so we took him out and put him in a Tupperware container.”

Oliver James, another colleague, who studies zoology, used kitchen tongs to transfer the scorpion to a plastic container.

“It was a little distressing,” he said, as no one knew whether the scorpion was poisonous or not. They gave water to the scorpion, which drank it immediately.

Phoebe said she tried to contact an animal welfare society, the RSPCA, but realized they dealt more with cats and dogs. She then contacted the National Reptile Welfare Center (NCRW).

The entity sent a person within a few hours. NCRW’s Chris Newman said cases like this are surprisingly common.

“The scorpion is Oliverus martensii. It has no other common name, other than Chinese scorpion,” he said.

He said a bite from this animal would be “a significant medical problem… potentially life-threatening, but the average adult would just have a really bad day.”

“It’s very worrying that this is the second one we’ve had in less than a month who has made this journey.”