Wayfair denies child trafficking conspiracies after claims came from overpriced products with girl names

This is all started on social media after users thought it was odd that their cabinets had ridiculous prices and girl names. Many of them "apparently" match up with missing girls, even those with more "unique" names. Some Reddit user claims that searching up the product names in some Russian based website called "Yandex" show images of little children.

This is one of their official statements, I have also read a Tweet that claimed Wayfair has also said that the overpriced products were from a website "glitch":

Wayfair told Heavy in an emailed statement: “There is, of course, no truth to these claims. The products in question are industrial grade cabinets that are accurately priced.” The company explained why the items in question had been removed from the site:

Recognizing that the photos and descriptions provided by the supplier did not adequately explain the high price point, we have temporarily removed the products from site to rename them and to provide a more in-depth description and photos that accurately depict the product to clarify the price point.

Here's some of the "alleged" proof:

Spoiler

Here's a thread on all the alleged missing people who have the same names as Wayfair products.

r/conspiracy - People have discovered a highly possible human trafficking hub operating through Wayfair. $40 rugs, shower curtains, being sold for upwards of 10k a piece & include names of missing children in the tagline. Heres a good tweet with some matching missing person articles:

2,478 votes and 515 comments so far on Reddit

www.reddit.com

https://heavy.com/news/2020/07/wayfair-conspiracy-explained/

Early on July 10, a new conspiracy theory began trending on social media concerning American furniture retailer Wayfair. The conspiracy theory states that some of the cabinets on Wayfair’s website were being used for human trafficking because they were listed at high prices and many had strange names. To be clear, there is no evidence to support the conspiracy theory and Wayfair has firmly rejected the claims.
The Conspiracy Theory Originated on a Reddit Conspiracy Thread & Others Shared the Theory on Twitter
The conspiracy theory seems to have originated on the /r/conspiracy subreddit when a user named PrincessPeach1987 said that cabinets listed on Wayfair by vendor WFX Utility were priced over $10,000 and had distinctive names like “Yaritza” or “Samiyah.” The user suggested that these names could be placeholders for humans and human trafficking.

A Twitter user with the handle @edmmariluna posted about the conspiracy on Twitter and her post has since received over 215,000 likes and 87,000 retweets. Another user posted a series of photos on Twitter of the cabinets side-by-side with news articles about missing children with the same names as the cabinets.

One person said, “Hi. Just a friendly reminder that #Wayfair isn’t trending because the belief is that exploited children are being shipped in cabinets. It’s trending because the cabinets (among other products, such as shower curtains and blankets) may be a front. Have a nice day.”

One user replied to the original Reddit post and said they had contacted the human trafficking hotline and a case was being opened. Heavy contacted Polaris, the organization responsible for the National Human Trafficking Hotline, which said that due to confidentiality reasons, they could not provide more information or confirm whether they had received tips about the conspiracy.

The Reddit user who first posted about the conspiracy spoke anonymously with Newsweek and said they are “involved in a local organization that helps victims of human trafficking” which means they are “suspicious most of the time now.” However, they said they weren’t directly accusing the brand but just wanted to raise their concerns.

Many People Took to Social Media to Slam the Conspiracy Theory
Many people took to Twitter to share their disbelief at the conspiracy. Reporter Ben Collins wrote:

Pizzagate/QAnon people have Wayfair trending today. They falsely claim price glitches on storage boxes prove that the company is trafficking children. This took off because of a post on Reddit’s r/conspiracy subreddit yesterday, which is a clearinghouse for anonymous paranoia. We’re living in a second, more profound and politically important Satanic Panic. This time, everyone’s in on it. People will look for coincidences as narrow and stupid as pricing glitches on furniture sites as ‘proof’ a global cabal is eating children and controlling the world.

Journalist Aaron Gouveia wrote: “The QAnon and Pizzagate morons are working overtime today claiming Wayfair is trafficking children based on high prices on oversized cabinets online. I shit you not. There are people who actually believe this. Ignorance is the far more worrisome disease.” Another person posted:

This is just implacably ridiculous. No one is delivering huge boxes of live children to you from China. (97% of #Wayfair products come from China.) Find better hobbies, folks. If you are worried about child trafficking, the Trump admin has been doing it at the border since 2017.
— Victoria Brownworth #MasksSaveLives (@VABVOX) July 10, 2020

The post reads:

So the latest conspiracy is that #Wayfair is selling trafficked children in armoires off its website. You all never bought anything from Wayfair, did you? Everything arrives in 500 pieces with directions in Chinese to build it yourself. You’d have to build the kid, too. This is just implacably ridiculous. No one is delivering huge boxes of live children to you from China. (97% of #Wayfair products come from China.) Find better hobbies, folks. If you are worried about child trafficking, the Trump admin has been doing it at the border since 2017.

 

[Lucille Bluth]

LMAO. Some loon on Twitter is now suggesting that actress Naya Rivera, who recently went missing and is likely dead after a freak accident/drowning in a lake, is somehow involved in this Wayfair conspiracy.

https://twitter.com/Derpade14205396/status/1281796761321902083

I'm glad people are calling the user out.

 

[Pee Cola]

These items could just be placeholders. It wouldn't be the first time an online seller has listed items at ludicrously high prices for this reason.

With the names, a thousand monkeys mashing a thousand keyboards will eventually find every single unique female given name in existence. As for Yandex ... 2 + 2 = 5. Because algorithms.

If William of Ockham hadn't died nearly 7 centuries ago, he'd most likely arrive at a hypothesis not a million miles away from this one.

 

[Happy Fish]

I mean, what do you say to a child trafficking conspiracy claim? "You bet your sweet ass we made some cold hard cash by selling vulnerable children to rich pedos. What are you, gay?"

 

[Piga Dgrifm]

How much of the furniture at Comet Ping Pong was bought from here?

 

[Carpenter Trout]

LMAO. Some loon on Twitter is now suggesting that actress Naya Rivera, who recently went missing and is likely dead after a freak accident/drowning in a lake, is somehow involved in this Wayfair conspiracy.
View attachment 1441103

But if that turns out to be true, you can have your very own pet actress at a bargain price and free shipping.
Also there's already a snopes article on this, apparently.

 

[Echo_Ender]

If anything, this is money laundering. And putting names on the items is probably ti make them look like high-end artsy-fartsy crap if someone notices the high prices when glancing over it.

 

[keyboredsm4shthe2nd]

My memory's jogged. I actually do recall someone posting a screenshot of small objects for ridiculous prices in a fb ad. It was a gerbil cage or reptile tank for almost $10k. But I think it was on Chewy or some similar site. Perhaps that had a similar glitch. I'm starting to lean more towards coincidence tbh. But, there's also the "SKU numbers lead to kid pics" part that I can't even begin to verify. Sounds a little made up.

The only time I've ever heard of shit like this is supposed drug dealing on craiglist where a shitty piece of pottery is priced in the thousands and allegedly has a bag of cocaine inside.

 

[Stoneheart]

With the names, a thousand monkeys mashing a thousand keyboards will eventually find every single unique female given name in existence. As for Yandex ... 2 + 2 = 5. Because algorithms.

one or two, maybe, but there are just to many.

The only time I've ever heard of shit like this is supposed drug dealing on craiglist where a shitty piece of pottery is priced in the thousands and allegedly has a bag of cocaine inside.

i have seen a more clever version of it on TV...



Its not more out there than what congress thinks about russia or ukraine or well pretty much everything they can connect to trump.

 

[Trump's Chosen]

I mean, what do you say to a child trafficking conspiracy claim? "You bet your sweet ass we made some cold hard cash by selling vulnerable children to rich pedos. What are you, gay?"

Nah, you say "we don't even have a basement" or "No, that's a man from thailand" and you make sure word filters are in place so the question can't be asked again.

 

[Slur Slurry]

Fuck it,I can believe this. The world is so fucked up and strange why wouldn't they be selling missing children on a discount website?

 

[heathercho]

These items could just be placeholders. It wouldn't be the first time an online seller has listed items at ludicrously high prices for this reason.

With the names, a thousand monkeys mashing a thousand keyboards will eventually find every single unique female given name in existence. As for Yandex ... 2 + 2 = 5. Because algorithms.

If William of Ockham hadn't died nearly 7 centuries ago, he'd most likely arrive at a hypothesis not a million miles away from this one.

I know someone with an ebay store who does this - they add $1000 or so to the price for inventory and algorithm reasons. They know no one will buy the expensive one but can keep the item in the algorithm for search reasons.

As for the names.... there'd need to be more evidence than this....

 

[Ebonic Tutor]

It was SKU#'s bringing up the girls on Yandex, not their name. Just the item numbers, that's why it's freaky.

 

[The Crazy Macer]

It was SKU#'s bringing up the girls on Yandex, not their name. Just the item numbers, that's why it's freaky.

https://www.newsweek.com/wayfair-child-trafficking-conspiracy-theory-cabinets-scandal-1517013

"Supporters of the theory have also urged skeptics to use a Russian search engine to search for the stock keeping unit number (SKU) associated with various Wayfair products, which returns image results full of children in bathing suits. However, none of the SKU searches return images of a single child, which would seem to run counter to the implication that the Wayfair SKUs secretly provide data regarding the specific child to be purchased. In addition: following the search engine instructions with any random string of numbers returns the exact same results."

 

[HOMO FOR LIFE]

It's time to shut twitter down.

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

I suspect the various names are because Wayfair won’t let multiple third parties sell the same alibaba shit so they rename it slightly - and the high prices are to keep their “position”

wayfair is a scam but not for this reason lol

 

[W00K #17]

Why are none of these reddit tards archiving their shit?

 

[guffrey__]

This mislabeled shit and high-price shit happens quite more often with online retailers than people care to believe, it's just everyone's so used to Amazon's top-tier structure they think all online retailers have a perfect system in place.

 

[Hecate]

does anyone have literally any proof? a&h has always been bad but come the fuck on guys

 

[Fareal]

Not a conspiracy. Wayfair just has some really fucked up price points.

Source: Am Karen

 

[Dread First]

I don't know if this is true, and frankly I don't want to know if this is true. In a post-Epstein world, anything's possible. What's really fucked up is that even if this turns out to be a massive hoax, it's probably not stopping people in other parts of the world from using a similar ruse but with different execution. Still, I'm erring on the side of skepticism on this one.

Search engines are never transparent about how their algorithms truly work, so I don't expect Yandex to do any sort of damage control because they do have plausible deniability. Still, that does beg the question of why children were shown in searches of SKU numbers. You can definitely make an argument that Yandex may very well be used for porn so that may explain why the algorithms behave as such. I mean, the same thing happens to Bing too and it's basically a meme that Bing is used for porn. Still, the circumstantial evidence that is present seems to line up a little too well for me to fully give Yandex and Wayfair the benefit of the doubt.

I'm skeptical of how true this is but given past precedent, it's not implausible now is it?