Wayfair Inc. is an American e-commerce company that conducts its business by selling furniture and home-goods.
Previously known as CSN Stores, it has a digital platform that operates branded retail websites where the company sells more than 14 million items from its more than 11,000 suppliers.
And here, the publicly-traded company became the subject of a conspiracy theory claiming that Wayfair was not only selling furniture, as it was also conducting an illegal business involving child sex trafficking.
Theories and suspicious arise because coincidences happened one after another.
First, it was shared that the furniture store was found to have some overpriced items if compared to other similar items. For instance, Wayfair's products like pillows and cabinets were listed for thousands to more than ten thousand dollars. Similar items on the website and on competitors' websites however, were listed a lot lower, at around $100.
Second, the products in question were marketed under the names of missing children, some with a number following each item. For example Wayfair had cabinets named “Samiyah 5-shelf Storage Cabinet”, “Yaritza Storage Cabinet” and others. And they were all went briefly for sale for $13,000 each.
The conspiracy theories appeared originally from a post under the “conspiracy” section of Reddit on July 9, 2020.
That post noted that Wayfair was selling closets from WFX that were priced at more than $10,000, and offered child trafficking as a possible explanation.
Others believe that buyers would do some other things, like extracting their organs, or as a way to launder money, something related to espionage, murder-for-hire and others.
That post, like so many other conspiracy theories, offered this notion as a mere possibility by accuses that are not based on police reports, firsthand accounts, financial records, or deep investigative reporting. Rather, it was based on speculations that went viral.
As the rumor circulated on social media, people started echoing the message with additional “evidence” of Wayfair’s supposedly nefarious activities.
For instance, some social media users claimed that searching for the stock keeping unit number (SKU) associated with these exorbitantly-priced items preceded by the term “src usa” on the Russian search engine Yandex will return images of young female children with bikinis.
As for the relation with the missing children, it should be noted that hundreds of thousands of children are reported missing every single year.
What this means, the fact surrounding Wayfair's product names that were the same as the first names of some of the missing children could be a coincidence.
This was concluded as some of the missing children cases were already closed.
But still, social media users were looking to find a celebrity to relate with this conspiracy. The first that was caught, was the American actor and filmmaker Tom Hanks.
This went viral after some conspiracy theorists dug deep into Hanks' Instagram posts, and found one that was shared on July 18, 2016.
The photo Hanks shared, was a picture of a glove he found lying on the ground in Red Bluff, California.
"Gimme five!" Hanks wrote in the caption.
On the ground, next to the glove, a "SRC USA" is written in chalk.
Following the conspiracy, the comments for the photo are then packed with people who were either trying to figure out what is going on, or whether the actor is linked to the Wayfair theory.
Wayfair noted that the products were industrial grade cabinets, and that they had been accurately priced. Susan Frechette as the company's spokeswoman said that:
"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."
So here, the claims that Wayfair was trafficking children were based almost entirely on people's confusion over some expensive products.
The claims were not based on any real documents or evidence.
In other words, this conspiracy theory is just like so many conspiracy theories that started from some unfounded assumptions that would be sickening if it were actually true.
Despite the rumors have been proven false, social media users continued accusing Wayfair of wrongdoing, by also referencing 'Pizzagate', the debunked conspiracy theory that went viral during the 2016 United States Presidential Election.
At that time. the personal email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, was hacked. Conspiracy theorists falsely claimed the emails contained coded messages that connected several high-ranking Democratic Party officials and U.S. restaurants with an alleged pedophilia and human trafficking.
One of the accused, was the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C., which was said to be a place for harboring child sex slaves.