Speaker 1: How did an online furniture company get wrapped up in
child trafficking? And how are they still in business today?
Follow me down the rabbit Hole about Wayfair. Hello, friends,
and welcome back to the rabbit Hole. I'm your host Danny,
and today we were talking about Wayfair. We're also going
to touch on Etsy towards the end of the episode
because they're basically doing the same thing, and I thought
it was important to include. Thank you Melissa Kenny, Dolores
Andrew Nathan Kaysen Amber for requesting this episode. I feel
like I get a lot of dms about this topic
as well, so thank you. And of course, before we
get started, I love to thank our sponsors, So thank
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to sponsor me, which is just supporting our podcast. So
I really appreciate that. Wayfair is an American e commerce
company that sells furniture and home goods online. The company,
which is based in Boston, Massachusetts, was started in August
of two thousand and two by Nearraze Shaw and Steve Conin,
and it was originally known as CSN Stores. Both Narage
and Steve graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Science.
Prior to starting Wayfair, they had two other companies, Simplify
Mobile and IXL, a global consulting firm not to be
confused with the tutoring app that you might get ads
for in a podcast, or at least like that's where
I hear.
Speaker 2: Ads for IXL.
Speaker 1: CSN started with the website Rasinstands dot com, selling media stands.
Speaker 2: And storage furniture.
Speaker 1: The following year two thousand and three, they added patio
and garden goods suppliers, three online stores, and more than
a dozen employees.
Speaker 2: So they started with just the two of them.
Speaker 1: By the second year, now they've got over a dozen employees.
Of course, the expansion didn't stop. They continued expanding their
catalog over the next years, adding home to core office, institutional,
kitchen and dining furniture and materials, as well as bed
and bath materials, luggage.
Speaker 2: And lighting.
Speaker 1: By two thousand and six, the company had one hundred
million dollars in sales. Seeming to expand into every catalog
they could, they set their sights on expanding to international markets.
They started with Canada and the UK in two thousand
and eight, and Germany in two thousand and nine. At
the end of two thousand and nine, they launched jos
and Maine, a member's only online store. By twenty eleven,
CSN Stores owned over two hundred online stores. These shops
were pretty niche in their products, which is why they
had to buy like so many of them, shops like
Cookwaar dot com, every Atomic clock dot Com, and strollers
dot Com. In order to consolidate all the online stores
in one place, they created the online store Wayfair. They
rebranded CSN Stores to b Wayfair, and they specified quote
a name chosen by a branding firm with no other
meaning end quote.
Speaker 2: I actually laughed out loud when I read.
Speaker 1: That, like, why are they specifying this and why are
so many people questioning the name Wayfair. Wayfair dot Com
officially launched on September first, twenty eleven. A year later,
they had all the other websites consolidated into Wayfair, except
for josep Maine and all modern in August of twenty twelve,
they launched Wayfair supply for all their government, institutional and
business contracts. By twenty fourteen, the company was valued at
more than two billion dollars. It was also given the
title the largest online only retailer for home furniture in
the US and the thirty third largest online retailer in
the US overall. In twenty seventeen, a South Dakota lawsuit
aimed at forcing Wayfair to collect and pay sales tax
made it to the Supreme Court. The court held that
states may charge tax on purchases made from out of
state sellers even if the sellers do not have a
physical presence in the taxing state. The next year, they
held their first Wayday sale It's kind of like Amazon
Prime sale Wayday. This helped to increase their sales by
four hundred percent. They were also hiring more people. The
problem was, according to a marketing professor at Emory University,
the company was losing ten dollars for every new customer.
They were forecasted to do six point six billion dollars
in sales that year, but they had significant losses in
the years leading up to twenty eighteen. In twenty seventeen,
they reported a two hundred and forty five million dollar loss.
They were prioritizing growth over profitability. With all this, they
were approved for a thirty one point four million dollar
tax break in December of twenty eighteen, as long as
they hired at least three thousand more people in Boston
and three hundred people at their call center in Pittsfield.
Speaker 2: This tax break.
Speaker 1: Is one of the largest ever rewarded by the state
of Massachusetts. Twenty nineteen brought another lawsuit to the company.
Investors sued Wayfair, claiming the company's executives misled them about
the value and actions of the company and were losing
the money while the top brass cashed out. These lies
had to do with the level of demand for the
products and how much the company was spending on advertising,
which wasn't much up to this point. They had done
some advertising in twenty seventeen, but they didn't spend.
Speaker 2: A lot of money on it.
Speaker 1: But also they have reported a strong second quarter in
twenty eighteen and made claims that the third quarter would
follow suit, which kind of makes sense, right, But when
the numbers came out, they had higher losses in the
third quarter. Than they had in the previous year. It
doesn't help that the owners sold off thousands of their
own shares in between the positive announcement about the second
quarter and the negative announcement about the third quarter. Investors
obviously felt like they were being misled, but the case
was dismissed in twenty twenty. Apparently the investors failed to
make adequate allegations that Narage and Steve misled investors with
their forward looking projections before they collectively sold sixty nine
million dollars worth of stock. That same year, twenty nineteen,
they opened their first permanent physical storefront and made the
Fortune five hundred list for the first time. But the
lawsuit wasn't the end of issues. In twenty nineteen, Wayfair
employees announced plans to walk out and protest of a
contract the company was putting together to sell beds to
temporary migrant detention camps in Texas. The employees demanded the
contract to be terminated or at least for the company
to donate all the profit from the order. They refused
to do either, so on June twenty sixth, several hundred.
Speaker 2: Employees walked out.
Speaker 1: The thing that is so interesting about this is that
it seems to be pretty politically motivated, and just two
months after this Walkoutnarrage spoke at an event where he
said that they hire based on talent and being non political,
specifying that he doesn't want anybody that comes in with
politics in the forefront of their mind.
Speaker 2: Probably because of this walkout that had.
Speaker 1: Just happened, The company went on to hire fifteen hundred
more people before the year ended. However, the next year,
before COVID even hit, so it wasn't because of COVID,
they announced a layoff of five hundred and fifty employees,
about three percent of their global workforce. Three hundred and
fifty of those employees were let go from the Boston headquarters.
Despite getting that thirty one point four million dollar tax
break just two years prior to hire a bunch of people.
As of twenty twenty, the company had yet to share
a profitable quarter, which, like, how can you operate a
company with zero profits? I don't really understand that, especially
like such a large company. I guess it's not for
me to understand. During COVID, everything was kind of quiet,
but in twenty twenty two, the employees were notified that
there would be a nine hundred person in layoff because
the post pandemic growth wasn't what they had anticipated. They
were facing losses in a stock drop of seventy percent
from the beginning of the year through August when they
finally made the layoff announcement. They posted a loss of
three hundred and seventy eight million dollars in Q two
of twenty twenty two. However, they did open another physical
location that year as well, which you're having all these losses,
you're about to fire a bunch of people, so put
a bunch of money into a physical location.
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's gonna help.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty four, they opened yet another physical location,
although this one was the first non outlet location. In
twenty twenty five, in an attempt to downsize a bit,
they withdrew from the German and Austrian markets, which caused
seven hundred and thirty people to lose their jobs, which
is again about three percent of their workforce. Today, Wayfair
is still operating. They have four brands that still operate
their own sites, all Modern, which first launched in two
thousand and six, Birch Lane, which launched in twenty fourteen,
Jos and Maine their second specialty retail brand that launched
in twenty ten, and Paragold their newest brand that launched
in twenty seventeen, and it's also known as their luxury brand.
Normally I would go more into the history of the
owners Nearrage Shaw and Steve Cooning, but there isn't a
whole lot about them. They seem to have met in university.
I'm assuming because they both went to the same university,
they did not come from similar backgrounds prior to that.
Nearrage has a foundation of which he is the board
of director and his wife is the president. This foundation
focuses on things like school food, summer meals, open and
safe schools, pandemic food funding, wellness in schools, social media
and mental health, women's history and research, and community support.
Speaker 2: It seems like most of their work had to do
with the pandemic, though.
Speaker 1: They both are part of a startup funding company Pillar,
who specializes in AI and tech startups, and for the
most part, their lives are pretty private. In twenty twenty,
rumors started circulating that Wayfair was involved in child sex trafficking.
This is because people were noticing that some of the
products on the site were marked up way higher than
similar items. For example, most bookshelves are posted for less
than five hundred dollars, most of them being less than
two hundred dollars actually, but every now and then there
would be one that's posted for upwards of eight thousand dollars.
What added fuel to the fire was that the names
of the items being sold at outrageous costs were people names.
So I dug in because some companies do like to
name their items people names, so that's not totally unheard of,
except that's not the case here. In fact, the naming
of the items on the site doesn't seem to have
any rhyme or reason. Some of them do have human names,
while others have Ikea type names, and still others have
just dimensions as their names. This could be because of
the nature of the compon company like Wayfair buying up
a bunch of smaller companies and then consolidating them all
into one website. So maybe and maybe they let all
their companies keep the names of their furniture as it was.
But it is odd because even under certain stores, the
names don't always line up. Not all the names are
human names. With this specific store on Wayfair, there doesn't
seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why
some have human names and some don't, but there does
seem to be a lot of proof of this conspiracy.
The overpriced items with their associated human names seemed to
correspond to missing children. What first brought the attention was
that they were selling what seemed to be the exact
same storage cabinet, but with different names and at different prices.
All the cabinets had female names, and they were priced
between ten thousand and fifteen thousand dollars. Others started noticing
the oddities as well, things such as ten thousand dollars
throw pillows and sixteen thousand dollars baby photo albums. Of course,
Wayfair came out and said it was just a glitch
in the system and that all those products would be scrubbed.
Others speculated that maybe they jacked up the price because
the items were out of stock, but they didn't want
to admit that they were out of stock, which doesn't
make any sense to me, Like, I've never heard of
a company doing that, And they're like, oh, we don't
have any more of this, but if we make it
an outrageous price, nobody's gonna buy it. I don't know
if an item's out of stock, just like mark it
out of stock. They tried to say, quote unquote peto
hunters were on a rampage due to the recent allegations
around Pizzagate and Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 2: But that sounds an awful lot like a cover up
to me.
Speaker 1: It was quickly noticed that the storage cabinets that all
looked the same, it just had different names and different prices,
seemed to line up with missing girls. Uritza Castro went
missing in twenty twenty. She was from Connecticut and was
only sixteen, and there was a cabinet for sale on
Wayfair with the name Euritza for thirteen eight hundred dollars.
It was marked down from its original price of fifteen thousand,
nine hundred and seventy five dollars. Annabel Wilson from Kansas
went missing in twenty twenty at the age of four fourteen.
Not long after, a storage cabinet named Annabel was put
on Wayfair for ten thousand, nine hundred dollars. It was
marked down from twelve thousand, five hundred and four dollars.
Kyla Coleman from Ohio went missing in twenty twenty, she
was only sixteen, and a cabinet named Kyla was being
sold for twelve thousand, one hundred dollars, marked down from
thirteen thousand, nine hundred and seventy nine dollars. Samaya Mumman
was a seventeen year old girl from Columbus, Ohio that
had gone missing in twenty nineteen, and a cabinet with
the name Samaya was for Salem Wayfair for twelve thousand,
nine hundred dollars. Although a video did come out with
a girl, it went viral. Actually this girl was saying
like I'm Samaya, I'm not missing, and actually it's starting
to like make me mad that you all think that
I'm missing. You're tying to this Wayfair conspiracy. I don't
think that takes away from the other girls that are
still missing and their names were used by Wayfair. Maybe
this girl wasn't Samaya at all, because she did seem
to be like the most popular cabinet that people were posting.
They would post that cabinet and then this missing girl
poster and that picture was of the same girl. So
maybe that's why they're like, hey, post this picture of
you saying that you're not missing. Whether we can believe
it or not, I'm not sure, but that doesn't take
away from the other people. Outside of the cabinets, there
were throw pillows that were being sold at an outrageous
price as well. These pillows were Zodiac sign astrological constellation
personalized throw pillows out like their whole name. One was
named Derrett, another was named Duplicus, and another was named Dunning.
All of these pillows were selling for ten thousand dollars.
Who's paying ten thousand dollars for a personalized throw pillow
like a Zodiac sign throw pillow unless it wasn't a
throw pillow. Because Mary Derrett from Houston, Texas went missing
in twenty seventeen. She was only sixteen and she was
heavily reliant on medication daily to continue her life. I
don't know what the illness was, but she needed that
medication tomorrow. Duplicis was a thirteen year old girl from Southfield, Michigan,
who went missing. Tory Dunning from North Carolina was fifteen
years old when she went missing. Their last names all
line up with the ten thousand dollars throw pillows, and
the other pillows didn't have these weird last name connections
and also weren't ten thousand dollars. Ellen DeGeneres has a
partnership with Wayfair, which I thought was very interesting. She
has ed Ellen Degenereses. It launched in twenty fifteen, and
all the items are inspired by her personality. Through that line,
she was selling some pillows that were outrageously priced, just
like the other throw pillows.
Speaker 2: She was trying to get in on the action or something.
And if you know.
Speaker 1: Anything about Ellen DeGeneres, you know that she was one
of the worst human beings on this planet. So I'll
go ahead and cover her next week. That way we
can just dive into how disgusting she is. But these
were just.
Speaker 2: Lumbar pillows, that's all.
Speaker 1: They were called lumbar pillows and they were being sold
for ten thousand, ninety eight dollars. They didn't have any
name associated with them, which is different from all the
other Wayfair items. But I don't think it takes away
from the fact that these might be part of this
child sex trafficking. But because they didn't have human names
associated with these pillows, some people believe that these throw
pillows that she was selling on her line on Wayfair
were actually her personal pillows that they were just priced
really high because they were used by Ellen DeGeneres. But
if that was the case, wouldn't you advertise that, Like,
you would just put that in the description because you
would want people to buy them. Why else would people
buy ten thousand dollars pillows when most of the throw
pillows on Wayfair site are somewhere between like less than
twenty five dollars and two hundred dollars. I didn't see
any throw pillow that was over two hundred dollars, and
in fact, as of today, Ellen DeGeneres doesn't have throw pillows.
Speaker 2: On her site on Wayfair at all.
Speaker 1: Of course, as soon as this made headlines, the pillows
prices were changed like the next day to only ninety
nine dollars, and they sayd that it was just an error,
But that feels like a convenient excuse. This next story
is a little out of our timeline, but I'm sharing
it because of the like I think that it really
adds credibility to this conspiracy. So, a six year old
girl went missing in nineteen ninety four from her home
in La California. Her name was Crystal Ann Timek. Crystal's
cousin Kristin has never stopped looking for her. She every
now and then will like put in the search bar
like Crystal Ann and just see what pops up. When
Kristin found a tall floor lamp listed under Crystal's name
on wayfair site for eight thousand dollars, she had this
like spark of hope that maybe it was her cousin.
So this was actually before the Wayfair conspiracy had come out.
She did what any family member looking for their lost
lovel would do. She called the Center for Missing Unexploited Children,
who basically just brushed her off and was like, that's
just a coincidence. So then she called the FBI. The
FBI was like, hey, let's get your information. We'll call you,
we'll come out to you. We'll come we'll talk to you.
And then they just never did. They never followed up
on it. So she was like, what am I supposed
to do? This has Crystal Anne's name and it's eight
thousand dollars like this, it's just odd.
Speaker 2: It was just an oddity.
Speaker 1: So she decided she'll just buy the lamp herself. She
logged into her Wayfair account, she clicked purchase, and when
she went to the checkout page, it asked her to
log in again. This happens sometimes on sites, so she
really didn't think anything of it, So she just logged
in again because she's gonna buy this eight thousand dollars
lamp that has her cousin's name on it. Well, when
she logged in again, it told her that she didn't
have the credentials to purchase said lamp. I'm not aware
of special credentials needed to purchase certain things on the site,
but apparently there are some, and maybe that's how people
like Jeffrey Epstein are able to purchase these items or children.
In the new wave of Epstein files released, there are
some interesting receipts. On June twenty eighth, twenty eighteen, Coriina Shulika,
Epstein's girlfriend, maybe associate, maybe assistant.
Speaker 2: I don't know. She's spending a lot of his money.
Speaker 1: She paid wayfair eight four hundred and fifty three dollars.
Does say why she paid this or what she bought.
All we know is how much she paid that. She
then forwarded that email onto Bella Cline, one of Epstein's accountants,
and said, quote confirmation from PayPal for the same order
end quote what's interesting is just a few hours after
she made this payment to Wayfair, she canceled her billing
agreement with Wayfair.
Speaker 2: LLC through PayPal.
Speaker 1: Oddly, just five days prior to this purchase, a fifteen
year old girl from Columbus, Ohio was reported missing. Her
name was Joanna Hernandez Pacheco and to this day she
has not been found. And when this conspiracy was at
its most popular, there was a Joanna WFX utility cabinet
for sale. So WFX is the same line on Wayfair
that was selling all the other cabinets with missing girls
names at exuberant prices. Oh and by the way, WFX
Utility is still selling the exact same storage cabinet on Wayfair.
And guess how much it is? Just guess Nope, you're wrong.
It's one hundred and forty dollars, not ten thousand dollars,
not twelve thousand, not fifteen thousand dollars, one hundred and
forty dollars.
Speaker 2: You can buy this cabinet. Wayfair tried to.
Speaker 1: Brush all this off and be like, oh, that's it's
utility cabinet. That's just how much it is. Well, how
come today, after inflation has hit crazy. The cabinet is
only one hundred and forty dollars. In another instance, Karina
tried to spend three four hundred and ten dollars on Wayfair,
although she was trying to use a card that was
maxed out, so the order was declined. Karina seemed to
really like Wayfair because she also made a number of
orders from Wayfair that seemed to be like just normal orders.
For instance, she bought an egg poaching skillet for like
sixty dollars, which seems to check out right. She also
bought things to remodel a bathroom, like a sink, a faucet,
and a light. And while all those things seemed to
be normal purchases, it did give me pause because if
you have as much money as Epstein did, don't you
have people for that? An interior designer, somebody that comes
in designs this whole new bathroom for you, then goes
out orders all the things, acquires it, all brings it back.
And typically, I mean, I don't know for sure, but
when you're a millionaire, you have a lot more expensive things. Granted,
a lot of things she was purchasing was on all
modern and not necessarily just Wayfair I don't know. It
was just weird to me. I'm not saying it's anything
to look further into.
Speaker 2: It was just odd.
Speaker 1: Krena was also found in the Epstein files making purchases
off of Etsy. Like her Wayfair purchases, most of them
are seemingly normal Etsy orders. However, in December of twenty
twenty three, a couple years after this Wayfair conspiracy was
hitting really hard, something very similar was happening on Etsy.
Standalone photos of pizza as well as pictures of children
holding pizza and wings were being sold for thousands of dollars.
In one instance, there was a picture of two pizzas
and a cell phone with the description picture of pizza.
Only one available for nine thousand dollars. If it really
is just a picture of pizza, then wouldn't you be
able to make copies like as many copies as you wanted?
Speaker 2: Why is only one available?
Speaker 1: In another case, there was an item that had ai
photos of young girls holding a slice of pizza and winking.
One of them did have her tongue out while the
other one didn't. The description said pizza pile instant download
encryptied and there was only one left and it was
for sale for four thousand dollars. They specified that there
were two JPEGs included, so it makes me wonder if
it was maybe like child porn. These were being sold
by the store Yummy Yum Pizza. There were others for
sale as well. One picture of pizza was three thousand
dollars with only one left. Several people had that in
their carts. Another had an AI picture of a kid
with wings winking. It also said it was for four
thousand dollars, but it got worse because there were other
AI looking pictures for items such as cheese Pizza with
Pepperoni for thirty two thousand, seven hundred and ninety one dollars,
Stars and Cheese Pizza for twenty six thousand, two hundred
and thirty two dollars, Forever Young Pizza for twenty thousand,
four hundred and sixty one dollars, and the once Lucky
Pizza for nineteen thousand, six hundred seventy four dollars, all
being sold by the store of the Ash Pizza. And
we're all digital downloads.
Speaker 2: What is it? Because it's definitely not a picture of pizza.
Speaker 1: Because these were just AI pictures anybody could get on
AI and create that you're not buying that. For twenty
six thousand, thirty two thousand, there was another item and
I hate to even say it like that, Like I
don't even want to say the word item, because it's not.
It was said to be children's overalls. That's what it's
marketed as, and it was also marked as a rare find.
The pictures were of a little girl. She was maybe
one to two years old. She could walk in a
hand knitted jumpsuit. However, the price was thirty five thousand,
two hundred and ten dollars. I don't think that we're
selling the overalls either way. The stores selling the pizza
images and the overalls.
Speaker 2: On Etsy have been shut down.
Speaker 1: It is unclear if it was Etsy that shut them
down or if it was the actual sellers that shut
down their own sites. Also, on Wayfair, all of those
weird cabinets have been taken down. They're no more weird,
crazy expensive cabinets or throw pillows. But either way, the
problem hasn't stopped.
Speaker 2: It's just moved.
Speaker 1: In twenty sixteen, it was Pizzagate. In twenty twenty, it
was Wayfair. In twenty twenty three, it was Etsy. It
doesn't stop. This isn't a right wing, left wing issue.
There is a real pedophile issue. We should be more outraged.
It's absolutely disgusting what they have been getting away with
for years, and conspiracy theorists are just playing whack a mole,
exposing it when it rears its ugly head. But we
aren't getting to the root cause of the.
Speaker 2: Problem, which is intentional.
Speaker 1: And when we do try to bring it to light,
they call us conspiracy theorists, and half the world doesn't
even believe what we are trying to say. They just
bury their heads in the sand. We have to stop
burying our heads in the sand. We have to stand
up and say enough is enough. Pam Bondi says that
if we prosecute the whole system will collapse. Well, let
it collapse. Then if the system is being held up
by pedophiles that are blackmailed into compliance, let the system collapse.
We aren't meant to be governed by career politicians anyway.
It's time for a new system where children can actually
be protected, not be be abused by all the people
in their life that are supposed to be protecting them,
be sold off to the highest bidder. We have to
stop this nonsense. It's disgusting. It gets me so heated
every single time, every time I cover one of these episodes,
because I want to do something bigger about it, and
I don't know what that thing is. And I wish
I had the answer, because then I could tell you
what to do too. So if you have the answer,
let me know, please, And until next week, my friends,
stay skeptical, and I'll see you all then. Hey, friends.
The rabbit Hole is an independent podcast, written, hosted, and
produced by me Danny Mercy. Special thanks to Lindsey for
research and writing. If you love the podcast, please leave
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and visit our website at stayskeptical dot com for everything else,