Konspiracy Korner: The Wayfair Human Trafficking Ring

I’m not a huge believer in conspiracies. However, I can appreciate a good, wacky, paranoid conspiracy theory as much as the next guy. More so, probably.

I’ve decided to write about it anytime I hear a conspiracy theory that a.) I’ve never heard before or, b.) offers a new, insane wrinkle on one of the oldies-but-goodies.

A word of warning, first: please, please, PLEASE do NOT take this as an endorsement or validation of any conspiracies you may read here. They are for entertainment purposes only and are (probably) baying-at-the-moon levels of insane. If you find yourself being lured into anything I write here STOP READING IMMEDIATELY! With that having been said…

Have you heard the online furniture retailer Wayfair is actually a human trafficking ring? The “Wayfair-human trafficking” conspiracy is so new, Snopes only tracks the origins back to…uh, last Thursday. Seriously, this conspiracy is less than a week old. So…jackpot?

The whole thing, according to Snopes, got started because one person saw an item priced much, much higher than similar items on the site.

In addition to $10,000 shower curtains, other internet sleuths found cabinets being sold for thousands of dollars more than they should have been worth.

Move over, Woodward and Bernstein! UnicornPlushy has blown the lid off of the biggest scandal of the past century.

More fuel was thrown on the fire by someone whose Twitter handle seems to identify them as a Qanon doof. They posted the name of a missing teenager with the same name as a super-expensive pillow:

Oh, the names are part of the scandal. Many of the Wayfair products have names, kind of like Ikea furniture does. Only, these names seem to sound like people’s names. So, the theory goes, you’re not paying 15 grand for a cabinet. You’re actually paying 15K for an abducted teenager. It’s unclear if you still kid the cabinet in addition to the trafficked kid.

This conspiracy actually had a few seemingly compelling points. Like the fact (confirmed by Snopes) that when you entered some of the merchandise stocking numbers into a Russian search engine, it returned with images of young female children. Snopes called this, “bizarrely, true”.

But, as soon as you realize many of the Wayfair-truthers are Q-anon nut-jobs, it jolts you back into seeing how koo-koo this conspiracy really is. Why would international human-traffickers advertise on a publically-accessible website? Why would they use the purported victims real names?

And then, they had to bring Tom Hanks into this whole sordid mess!

Dammit, Q-anon! Do you have to make EVERYTHING about Tom Hanks?