Woman says TikTok video saved her and friends from being sex trafficked

TikTok users believe viral video may show a woman targeting vlogger and her friends

A woman says she believes a human trafficker was deterred from approaching her and her friends after realising they were recording a video.

The TikTok user @moomoob***h posted what she believes is the moment she and two friends were targeted by the stranger on 20 January. The clip has since gone viral, reaching more than four million views and nearly 14,000 comments from concerned followers.

The three women were vlogging while they ate snacks at a table in the Chinatown neighbourhood of Montreal, the Daily Dot first reported. As they talk about the food they had just bought, a woman wearing a grey hoodie is seen standing behind them, apparently unaware that she was also being recorded.

The stranger seems to gesture with her hand to somebody out of the frame that they should go away and proceeds to shake her head no. She keeps her hands in her pockets and nervously looks around while remaining in the same spot.

The woman briefly addresses the group but then changes her demeanour when she realises they’re recording.

The purported trafficker is seen lurking behind the friend of the woman who posted the video (TikTok)

“Sorry girls do you guys have some...” she begins to say before noticing the cell phone. “Oh, sorry for photobombing.”

According to the woman who posted the video, the woman in the hoodie never finished what she was saying but continued to hover around the group even after they finished recording.

The woman in the hoodie has not been identified and there is no concrete evidence of any wrongdoing on her part. There is no suggestion that police were ever contacted about the incident.

But TikTok users echoed concerns about human trafficking and agreed that the woman in the hoodie looked “suspicious”.

“Honestly you should show this to the police [be]cause you could possibly save other people getting traffic by them,” one viewer commented.

Others theorised that because it was broad daylight, a more likely scenario was that the woman was trying to assess the situation before robbing the group.

“I thought so too initially but my tote bag was right on the floor, right where she was,” the woman who posted the video said in a follow-up TikTok. “So, I put my foot in between the loops so she wouldn’t be able to take it. She never came closer to the tote bag. ... She didn’t even look at it.”

The TikTok user said that she did not think the stranger was planning to rob her, and instead was plotting something more sinister (TikTok )

“I’m just saying maybe it was a potential human trafficking [situation],” she added. “I don’t know what would have happened, I still don’t know.”

The woman, whose real name is not available on her TikTok profile, said she did not reach out to police because she was unsure the information would be useful as the woman had technically not done anything wrong.

However, she said she wanted to warn people who might find themselves in a similar situation in the future to always be aware of their surroundings.

“I posted her face in case she is a bad person, so people know to be on the lookout for her,” she said.

The woman said she is not a tourist and has lived in Montreal for years, but it was the first time that happened to her while in the area.

According to Canada’s National Statistics Office, there were more than 3,500 human trafficking incidents reported to police between 2011 and 2021. Currently, this type of crime accounts for 0.01 per cent of all crimes reported.