It seems like every time some dumb social media trend dies, it’s not actually gone for good. It’s only gone dormant in order to return later and clog up our screens another day. That’s what has happened in the infamous (not real) case of child traffickers using to mark potential victims.
The were kind of a big deal for a minute, and it feels like they were plastered on every other car a few years ago, but their popularity seemed lost overnight in my town, maybe in the wake of those rumors that drivers were unwillingly volunteering information to child abductors and sex traffickers.
To be clear: . Of course, that little tidbit is not enough to prevent users on from dredging this up, as reports.
The TikTok user, , quoted from below is a self-proclaimed father of twins, and I would be remiss If I didn’t say that this privacy advocate probably shouldn’t be volunteering that kind of info — whether through social media or stick figure decals. The user helpfully points out the meaning of the cryptic child trafficker codes, per :
In his video, @dutchintheusa starts by saying, “Here’s something you might not know, but could save your life.”
As he stands in front of a car with the words “1F” written on the back window, he explains, “If you ever see this on the back of your car, someone is marking you.”
In the next shot, he stands in front of a car with “1F” written in the dust of a different window. “It’s marked with ‘1F,’ which stands for ‘one female,’ and it’s marked in dust.”
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In the final shot, he stands in front of a car sporting the popular window decal depicting a stick figure family. “And let’s not put these on our car and provide a shopping list for child predators,” he states.
I actually never made much of these stickers until Jason Torchinsky himself seven years ago, and oh, God, what hellish stick figure time loop have we found ourselves in?
Luckily, in the interim period between Torchinsky’s and now, the good folks over at saw fit to debunk this dumb rumor, summing up this secret code as anecdotal at best, as describes:
According to the fact-checking website , the “1F” story is false, and nothing more than a viral social media rumor.
They report, “When we try to boil down this rumor to its origins, we see that the claim is based on something someone saw on Facebook, written by a person claiming that their friend had heard from a stranger that the code ‘1f1b’ was being used by sex traffickers to flag future targets.”
Snopes concludes, “In other words, this rumor doesn’t exactly have credible origins.”
If doesn’t quite cut it for you, also cites a police department who concluded the same thing as the online fact-checkers. Which is to say you can rest easy knowing that the sex traffickers on the lookout for stick figure decals are not actually out there.
If there’s one thing that the TikTok user gets right, it’s that you probably should stay away from those lame decals. If you’re being extra careful, maybe also stay away from apps like TikTok that really are and .