Instacart shopper accused of harassing customer in Cherokee Co.

CHEROKEE COUNTY, S.C. (WSPA) – An Instacart delivery driver is accused of sending explicit text messages and harassing a customer after she used the service in Cherokee County.

According to the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, the victim used Instacart to get groceries delivered from a local store to her home near Blacksburg.

Deputies said the delivery driver, identified as 41-year-old Alan Craig Parker of Kings Mountain, got the victim’s phone number through the Instacart app and began sending sexually explicit text messages and nude photos on March 6.

The victim asked that she not be contacted and blocked the phone number, deputies said.

The sheriff’s office said Parker then began calling and sending messages from other numbers.

Deputies said the victim filed four police reports for harassment from March 6 through June 2.

Parker was arrested Sunday in Gaston County, North Carolina and is awaiting extradition back to South Carolina.

He has been charged with eight counts of communicating obscene messages for another person and second degree harassment.

“It is a good reminder with today’s technology and the information we freely give up for share for the sake of convenience that we always think about our personal safety first and do as much as possible to protect ourselves from people like this suspect,” said Cherokee County Sheriff Steve Mueller in a statement. “As we have no clue to the true vetting process that these companies use to select some of these third-party delivery personnel.”

In a statement, Instacart said their guidelines “explicitly prohibit any form of unwanted contact between shoppers and customers on Instacart, and we have no tolerance for this sort of behavior.”

“When communicating on Instacart, phone numbers are always anonymized and never shared between customers and shoppers, and we encourage all users to never share their personal information or communicate outside of the app,” the statement continued.

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