A Vancouver knife salesman worries that his company’s ability to hire summer help has dried up because of a years-old internet hoax claiming human trafficking rings are using job interviews to lure young people.
Tony Carlston, founder of Cutco Closing Gifts in Vancouver, said he had a class of 10 new hires scheduled to come in for training when he started seeing a well-shared Facebook post claiming Vector, the marketing arm of the Cutco direct-sales cutlery company, was drugging water to tranquilize and then abduct people.
“Our local recruiting office had 10 people set for training, and nobody shows up,” he said.
The original sharer, as he saw it, also listed herself as an employee at Skyview High School.
The woman is not listed on Skyview High School’s directory, and Carlston said he checked with the school principal, who didn’t recognize her.
Still, beyond the irrational panic such information seems tailor-made to foment, he was concerned the appearance of some official cachet made the spread worse.
He said the post was shared 2,000 times.
“Like four years ago this came out and circled around because people don’t spend 5 minutes and see if things are true,” he said. “Social media is what it is. People don’t do their due diligence.”
Urban legend and hoax tracker Snopes.com first looked into the phenomenon of supposed teen summer jobs as human trafficking fronts in 2015. The researchers affirmed it was a hoax.
Vector typically employs teenagers to sell knives door to door, and has been caught up in the rumor before.
Snopes, citing reporting from Buzzfeed, found that some of the similar stories gained traction through social media accounts, many novelty or parody accounts, specifically managed to push the most spreadable content, and thereby create a large audience for an ad base.
“So while claims of human trafficking fronts were rampant as teens lined up for summer work in June 2015, no substantive (or even flimsy) evidence supported such rumors,” Snopes said.
Carlston sells knives to real estate agents as gifts for closed sales, and employs about 40 people.
Typically, about 80 percent of those signed up will attend the training classes, he said. For no one to show up is unprecedented.
“I can’t definitively say it’s because of this, but we’ve been doing this for a long time, and this just doesn’t happen,” he said.
