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On 7 August 2016 Facebook user Megan Erickson published the following post to Facebook, reporting she narrowly avoided being abducted in the parking lot of a Walmart in Darboy, Wisconsin: Erickson maintained that a woman attempted to lure her to the stranger's vehicle under the auspices of sparing her (i.e., Erickson) further embarrassment due to the unexpected start of a menstrual period staining her clothes. However, Erickson said that she was surprised by the claim due to confirmed and permanent amenorrhea (i.e., absence of menstruation). As an alleged scheme for luring human trafficking victims, the scenario presented here doesn't sound like a well-thought out one. Most women are roughly aware of when to expect their monthly cycles (or regularly use hormonal birth control, which regulates periods), and even if the bizarre proposal initially fooled a tiny pool of woman, those putative victims — already on the way back to their own cars — could simply hotfoot it home in their own vehicles and change clothes rather than visiting a stranger's car to take someone else's clothing The claim was already treading a line of dubious plausibility when it went on to include the presence of a visiting police officer within earshot. As is common in viral Facebook kidnap warning posts, the ambient police officer character provides the narrative service of explaining what was otherwise a perplexing interaction. Erickson stated that the traveling cop warned her that the trick is just one of many used to abduct unsuspecting women and offered to wait with her while she contacted police but did not himself intervene. (Had the officer been out of earshot, the anecdote likely wouldn't have worked as a parable.) Erickson asserted that she was not just passing on a story, claiming that the incident personally happened to her on 7 August 2016: Erickson's account of a near-miss was one of dozens of pearl-clutching Facebook posts warning women about the convoluted means by which human trafficking scouts purportedly lure prey in popular in retail environments (and occasionally other public spaces). In June 2016 two similar stories of human traffickers circulated in Louisiana and Rochester, Minnesota about public parks, and a July 2016 viral warning about Kay Jewelers' rings-as-bait at a Wisconsin mall was one of the many circulating in perpetuity about human traffickers and big box stores' parking lots. During the summer of 2015, countless human trafficking warning Facebook and social media posts went viral despite the fact such stories rarely (if ever) reflected realistic dangers: In May 2015, a woman warned of a later-debunked incident at an Oklahoma Hobby Lobby store; in June 2015, Twitter was overrun with tweets about sex slavery rings targeting college kids at summer job interviews; and later that same month a long-circulating theme park abduction urban legend popped up again. Those popular warnings bred a frightening (and fabricated) story about purported teenaged abductors (using heroin-filled syringes to drug victims) at a Denton, Texas, Dillards department store, a claim from a woman who maintained she narrowly avoided human traffickers using gift bags as bait in the parking lot of a Hickory, North Carolina, Walmart store, and subsequent rumors claimed Target stores in Tampa, Longview (Texas), and Houston were sex trafficking scouting hotbeds. In all instances, the described interactions turned out to be misunderstood, vastly overstated, or entirely fabricated (such as a woman's claim about an unsettling encounter at a Michigan Kroger store) and were typically appended with lengthy treatises about how such narrow misses are every day occurrences that could happen to you. A common thread among the stories is a suggestion that abductors use gifts or promises of assistance to disarm female shoppers, as if such a ruse were necessary to abduct a person. The tales possibly served a greater purpose as talismans, providing readers with a belief that horrible tragedies were avoidable if they managed to resist gift bags, free rings, or other distracting objects. In the retellings, readers and spreaders of the rumors could feel they remained one step ahead of crafty criminals, well equipped to prevent themselves from becoming victims. These warnings posit the unlikely scenario abductors will opt to risk approaching randomly-chosen women, conspicuously attempt a questionable engagement ploy, and risk capture or notice by law enforcement agents or store security. Age-old urban legends about robbers enticing victims with perfume samples persist and evolve in large part due to the entrenched belief that criminals can and do operate in this fashion; consequently, people are primed by years of exposure to the rumors to interpret any and all atypical parking lot encounters as affirmative of near-misses with abductors: Similar (never substantiated) rumors about $100 bills placed under windshield wipers evidence the same lack of familiarity with the basics of such activity, describing a criminal plot that poses needless risk and a low return on investment for putative abductors or carjackers: In summation, the Darboy Walmart warning isinconsistent with the known patterns associated with human traffickers (described at length in the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime FAQ about human trafficking). The rumor is yet another variation on an urban legend that has circulated for at least two decades, a period during which we've never located any substantiated instances of such an abduction occurring. We contacted the Appleton City Police Department near the Darboy Walmart to ask about the rumor and spoke with a public information officer there. That officer said the department was aware of and investigating the claim, confirming that no calls or reports were made from the Darboy Walmart on 7 August 2016. Law enforcement sources repeatedly explain to us in response to these types of rumors that human traffickers typically recruit victims by attempting to establish relationships (and even a degree of trust) with them; abducting random victims from store parking lots via a convoluted and risky gambit doesn't fit any known pattern of that crime. And again, the presumptive goal of securing targets outside their vehicles could be accomplished much more efficiently by simply intercepting passersby parked in desolate areas of a parking lot with no premise for interaction required. On 8 August 2016, the Appleton Police Department issued a statement via Facebook confirming that the story was fabricated:
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