A widely shared clip spread the claim that a narrowly avoided kidnapping incident was witnessed at a mall in a Toronto suburb, where a victim's head was shaved after being knocked unconscious. This is false; law enforcement and the mall's management found no evidence of the event and the story echoes previously debunked claims about human trafficking.

"Police in Toronto are hiding this spread the news ... now," says the text over a video posted September 8, 2023 on Facebook by Jim Boutsikakis, a past candidate for parliament from the People's Party of Canada.

In the video, which has more than 356,000 views, a woman describes a story of a mother at Vaughan Mills mall in Vaughan, Ontario, who found her daughter in the restroom, knocked out, with her head shaven and a man poised to kidnap her, who fled the scene when the parent arrived.

She claims that this is a new kidnapping tactic being deployed in Vaughan and elsewhere in the York region outside of Toronto, which the police are attempting to keep quiet.

"There's over 60 reports of this happening to people -- it's not just one or two," she says. "And it's also not just women or children, it's men too."

The video appears to originate from a September 8 TikTok, where it generated tens of thousands of views across posts, before spreading to Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter.

Some reshared the video and alluded to human trafficking trends, while similar claims about kidnapping in the York region were published on X and...

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