Canada Post is alleging that a B.C. energy drink company operator defrauded it of $449,439 by manipulating prepaid postal labels.Canada Post stated in a Jan. 3 B.C. Supreme Court notice of civil claim that it is entitled to the return of the evaded postage, or items and proceeds traceable to it which were acquired through business transactions using the manipulated return labels. Canada Post alleged Jackson Lam operated an energy drink business named Prime Hydration Co.
through primehydrationco.ca (the website appears to be out of service). It alleged the business address was a UPS store in Burnaby. The claim said Lam had a Canada Post Small Business Solutions account under the name TROUBLEMAKERZ. The claim alleges Lam began a scheme in August 2022 to manipulate post office shipping labels from various retail clients including Bell Canada, COGECO, Eastlink and Shaw Communications – called the merchants in the claim. The claim said customers could enter their outgoing shipping address on the merchants’ websites and receive labels to return products to those merchants. Canada Post then invoiced the merchants for those upon the dispatching of the packages bearing such labels. The claim alleges Lam obtained 11,328 such labels between August 2022 and April 2023. It further said that Lam, through the TROUBLEMAKERZ account, then manipulated the labels to replace addresses with those corresponding to Prime Hydration. The claim said Canada Post received complaints for Bell Canada in January 2023 about labels issued in its name for purported returns that never arrived. Soon after, postal inspectors noted large quantities of packages bearing return labels identified with the TROUBLEMAKERZ account, the claim said. The complaints continued between January 2023 and April 2024 with packages dropped off at Burnaby and Richmond postal outlet