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Are sex traffickers marking targets with zip ties on cars? Here’s what police say
From the Montauk Monster to fairy sightings in England, outlandish internet hoaxes have been quickly and easily debunked. It’s the more realistic fakes that are harder to spot.
One such hoax claims that sex traffickers are putting zip ties on cars to make it easier to target victims. But police say it just isn’t true.
Warnings have popped up on TikTok, Facebook and Twitter over the last year, imploring women not to fiddle with zip ties they’ve found on their cars.
“My mom just informed me that a new human trafficking thing that is being done is putting zip ties on girls’ [mirrors on their car doors] when they see that they are alone so when the girl comes back to her car [she is] distracted trying to take it off then they come up behind [her] and take [her],” TikTok user @ohokaygirl said in a video now deleted from the platform. “If you see one of these on your car door, please get in your car, lock your doors, roll up your windows and drive away immediately.”
Following the spread of a similar social media post last year, the San Angelo Police Department in Texas made a statement dispelling the rumor, assuring area residents that neither it nor the Angelo State University Police Department had received any reports of zip ties on cars, lamp posts, houses, apartments or fences.
Officials in Michigan expressed similar sentiments, likening the claims to dangerous myth.
“It’s essentially like an urban legend or a scare-lore. The whole idea of the intent is just to scare people,” Lt. Brian Oleksyk told WILX, adding that sex traffickers use drastically different tactics.
“Most of the time for traffickers they are using a computer online or it’s somebody they already know from a previous relationship or a peer to peer. Very rare is it for them to prey on a stranger,” Oleksyk said, according to the outlet.
Celia Williamson, director of the Human Trafficking and Social Justice Institute at the University of Toledo in Ohio, echoed Oleksyk’s statement, calling the claims “ridiculous,” the Toledo Blade reported.
“It’s not about stranger danger, it’s more about people befriending you and over time they get you into situations where you can be trafficked,” Williamson told the outlet. “If you manipulate a kid into thinking that you’re her boyfriend, then they will participate in their own victimization, then I can traffic you for months or years.”
Zip ties are far from the first otherwise benign objects to get a bad rap following social media posts.
In 2017, LaFourche Parish Sheriff’s Office in Louisiana debunked a rumor that human traffickers were placing white stickers on windshields to mark future targets, McClatchy news group reported.
Police explained that the stickers were used by a car dealership to mark which cars had already been photographed, but some car owners say similar stickers had shown up on their vehicles, which had not been recently purchased, McClatchy reported.
The Department of Homeland Security says human trafficking — in which people are forced into labor or sex — is a multi-billion dollar industry, according to Time, with between 18,000 and 20,000 victims trafficked in the United States every year, Business Insider reported.
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