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On 23 March 2017, Facebook user Diandra Toyos shared a photograph said to have been taken inside an IKEA furniture store somewhere in Southern California, along with a common claim: that she and her family had narrowly avoided abduction by human traffickers while shopping there. Toyos' report was widely disseminated via social media and was also aggregated by a share-focused site called inspireMORE. Like many other accounts of its kind, it began with Toyos' saying she had read similar stories on Facebook (i.e., that human traffickers commonly ply their trade within chain stores) and went on to explain that fellow shoppers inside the IKEA behaved in a vague manner which convinced her she and her children were potential targets of a crime: At this point, we note that IKEA is well known for its unique (and occasionally frustrating) store layout that essentially directs customers to follow one another on the same path throughout a store — a subject addressed by Professor of Architecture Alan Penn in a 2011 talk about related planning structures: In her lengthy post, Toyos listed inferences based on her observations of the men in IKEA, among them that they were unaccompanied by wives, were not talkative, were not dressed in a fashion similar to one another, didn't smile at people, and were at one point adjacent to one of the store's exits. And she asserted that human trafficking and the abduction of children from chain stores such as IKEA and Target is happening all over [the place]: Toyos replied to commenters by denying that the men could have been loss prevention officers and reiterating that parents ought to watch their children in public, asserting that her belief was based on what [she knew], that the men were up to something, and that such occurrences were happening regularly across the United States: Presumably, Toyos was referencing the barrage of near-identical Facebook posts in which women have reporteclaim they had close brushes with human trafficking rings in Target, Walmart, mall parking lots, or craft stores. Rumors fitting that template began appearing in force on social media in May 2015, when a woman shared a later-debunked tale about an Oklahoma Hobby Lobby store. In June 2015, Twitter was awash in fears of a sex slavery ring targeting college kids at summer job interviews; and later that same month a long-circulating theme park abduction urban legend popped up again. Variations on that theme included a harrowing (yet false) story involving purported teenaged abductors (armed with heroin-filled syringes to drug victims) at a Denton, Texas, Dillards, a claim from a woman swearing she was a near-victim of human traffickers with gift bags in the parking lot of a Hickory, North Carolina, Walmart store, and a spate of rumors claiming Target stores in Tampa, Longview (Texas), and Houston were hotbeds of sex trafficking scouts. Almost universally, such reports were found to be based on misunderstandings, overstatements, embellishments, and not infrequently outright fabrications (including a woman’s claim about an unsettling encounter at a Michigan Kroger store and a convoluted scheme involving free rings from Kay Jewelers). Similarly, nearly all such reports were appended with lengthy commentary about how the purported near misses were in fact exceedingly common and could happen to anyone. Missing from the constellation of these hair-raising tales was documentation that abductions are commonly (or even rarely) being carried out in the described manner, as crime statistics don't seem to back up claims that such a ruse is truly happening all over. Free Range Kids author (and advocate for reason-driven parenting) Lenore Skenazy addressed the uptick in such reports on social media, pointing out their illogic and pleading for a realistic approach to the growing number of social media abduction horror stories: As noted above, Skenazy cited the prevalence of such tales as drivers of the belief this is happening everywhere. Moreover, she observed that the dozens of near-identical narratives do not match known patterns of abduction or trafficking: We attempted to contact Diandra Toyos via Facebook for further information but have not yet received a response.
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