A university student found a live scorpion crawling around inside her clothing parcel from the Chinese-owned fast fashion brand Shein.
Sofia Alonso-Mossinger, 18, initially believed that the venomous arachnid was a toy until it started moving.
The electrical engineering student from the University of Bristol said she hastily rezipped the bag, removed it from her room and called her flatmates for help.
She told the BBC: “I unzipped the outer packaging and saw something move and was like, what’s this.
“I thought I was dreaming. I feel like I am all right with spiders and things but it was scary being in my room with a random scorpion.”
She said they were “not exactly buzzing to have a scorpion in the flat”.
“At first, I’ll be honest, I said we should kill it and then everyone pointed out that wasn’t the most humane thing so we scooped it up and put it in a Tupperware.”
Her flatmate Oliver James, a zoology student, used kitchen tongs to transfer the scorpion into a plastic container.
“It was a bit nerve-wracking,” he said, as no one knew how venomous it was.
Shein told the BBC that it was investigating the incident.
The scorpion, identified as a Chinese scorpion, or Olivierus martensii, was retrieved by officers from the National Centre for Reptile Welfare (NCRW).
Chris Newman, from the NCRW, said reports of such stowaways were surprisingly frequent.
He said its sting would be “medically significant… potentially life threatening but an average adult would just have a really bad day”.
“It is quite worrying, this is the second one we have had in under a month that has come in this way,” he told the BBC.