The furniture store Wayfair is trafficking children via overpriced items.
In July 2020, social media users accused the Wayfair furniture store of child trafficking. This seriously serious rate is not based on police reports, first-hand accounts, monetary records, or in-depth investigation reports. Rather, it was based on the fact that some articles on Wayfair were priced at exorbitant costs compared to other similar items.
This rumor appears to have originated on the “conspiracy” section of Reddit on July 9, 2020. That post noted that Wayfair was selling utility closets from WFX that were priced at more than $10,000, and offered child trafficking as a possible explanation. That post, like so many other conspiracy theories, offered this notion as a mere possibility and said that it would be stomach churning “if … true.”
Is it imaginable that Wayfair is concerned about people’s traffic with its WFX Utility collection? Or are they just incredibly beloved cabinets? (Note the names of the cabinets) my abdomen hurts if it’s true 🙁
This post led to other users combing the Wayfair website in search of other oddities. One Twitter user, for instance, found a set of pillows and shower curtains that were listed for $9,999. As similar items on the website were listed for only $99, this person assumed that the only logical explanation was that the higher priced item was being used to traffic children.
If you are looking for a pink bungalow, lots of bath curtains and pillows are priced at $9,999. Wayfair is manipulating the kids, what the fuck
Same with other things. They all have big price jumps to like 10 grand. Wayfair also supplies the furniture at ICE detention centers, where children are going MISSING from
Overall, photographs showing dear closets and significant discrepancies on pillows, bath curtains and other pieces at the Wayfair are real. However, it takes a leap of logic to conclude that this is evidence that the store is engaged in child trafficking.
In fact, the more we think about this statement, the more absurd it seemed. Would a giant company really use its official online website to allow other people to buy young people online? Since these items are available to anyone with Internet access, wouldn’t it be conceivable for a user to accidentally worry about child trafficking? Why would a child trafficking operation use an approach that would be so simple to follow?
This is largely based on the concept that $10,000 is too expensive for a company and that there will have to be some other explanation, child trafficking, to justify its cost. However, at Newsweek, Wayfair noted that they were commercial quality closets and that their value was accurate. Wayfair stated that he had temporarily removed those pieces because the accompanying descriptions did not explain exactly the explanation for why it was worth it.
Wayfair told Newsweek in a statement:
“Of course, there is no fact in those claims. The products in question are industrial grade cabinets with exact prices. Recognizing that the images and descriptions provided by the supplier were not priced at the appropriate maximum price, we temporarily disposed of the products on the site to rename them and provide a more detailed description and images that, as it should be, describe the product to explain the price. “
We reached out to Wayfair for more information about the expensive pillows and shower curtains, but have yet to receive a response.
As the rumor circulated on social media, others provided more “evidence” of Wayfair’s supposedly destructive activities. For example, some have claimed that searching for the stock control unit (SKU) number related to those items preceded the term “src uses” in the Russian search engine Yandex returned girl symbols. That’s weird, right. However, searching for any random string of numbers preceded by “src uses” returns similar effects. It is imaginable that these search effects are connected to the Russian symbol that hosts the online page “Imgsrc”, which in the past housed symbols of child pornography. We have contacted Yandex for more information on those search effects and will update this article accordingly.
Others claimed that these products were named after young people. A cabinet, for example, gave the impression on Wayfair as the “Anabel Five Shelf Storage Unit”. This, according to advocates of this theory, corresponded to an Anabel Wilson who had disguised the impression in Kansas. While this might seem suspicious to those looking for a model, it should be noted that there were more than 400,000 entries for lack of minors at the FBI’s National Crime Information Center in 2019. In other words, the fact that some of those product names were the same because the names of the young lacking can also be a simple coincidence.
In addition, some of the instances of young people lacking that this theory has tried to link to Wayfair have already been resolved. The “Alyvia” shelf, for example, was intended to be connected to Alyvia Navarro. This autistic boy disappeared at the age of 3 in 2013 and, unfortunately, was discovered dead shortly after disappearing, drowning in a nearby pond.
On July 13, 2020, proponents of this theory began sharing a photo of a man dressed in a Wayfair blouse and claimed that he had recently been arrested as a component of a traffic network.
This is a genuine photograph of Fredrick Walker Jr., who was arrested on June 21, 2020, during a prostitution shooting in Barnesville, Georgia. However, those who shared this symbol as “evidence” of this Wayfair conspiracy theory did not mention that this user was only one of two dozen people arrested in the attack, that none of the other arrested users were dressed in Wayfair shirts, these new arrest reports did not mention any connection to the store and that there was no evidence that the patients in this case were children.
The claim that Wayfair deals with young people is almost entirely based on a person’s confusion about a beloved practice. This conspiracy theory, like so many conspiracy theories, began with wild, unfounded speculation that would be repugnant if true. At the time of writing, no credible evidence of this charge was presented.
But the conspiracy theory had a genuine impact. According to a July 20 press release from Polaris, its national hotline opposed to human trafficking (1-888-373-7888) gained an “extreme volume” of reports similar to this rumor (none of which contained data beyond what had already been reported online) that it was suffering to respond to other calls from potentially needy people. They encouraged the appellants to be more informed about “what human trafficking really looks like.”
National Criminal Justice Reference Service. “Special archive: lack of children”. Retrieved 15 July 2020.
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