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In August 2013 a warning about sex traffickers with Slavic or heavy accents posing as door-to-door booksellers was spread via social media sites such as Facebook: In typical online fashion, some posts repositioned the site of the suspicious activity from Arizona to Minnesota by changing all references to Gilbert, AZ to Winona County, MN. (The dog, Maximus, retained his name, thereby proving it's easier to shift a rumor 1,600 miles than it is to rename a pooch.) The story was false. That pushy door-to-door book and magazine sellers exist doesn't prove those vendors are looking for children to abduct and force into the sex trade, nor is it suspicious that such salespeople might ask residents questions about children in the area. The latter is simply a straighforward sales technique for locating potential customers for children's books, and being pushy is hardly an unusual quality for those who engage in the door-to-door sales trade. Said the Gilbert police about the tale: Likewise, police in Winona also proclaimed the rumor to be untrue: Similar claims about Estonian door-to-door booksellers in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, proved equally false: The warning was also debunked in news reports after spreading through the state of Missouri:
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