Is Victoria’s Secret tracking customers with RFID tags? Fact Check

Online rumours claim that Victoria’s Secret products contain RFID tags so customers can be tracked after they leave a Victoria Secret store.

FALSE

Many variants of the rumour claim that this is linked to sex trafficking.

Most of the rumours are spreading on video platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, and also on Facebook and Twitter.

Despite the claims, there is no evidence or reason to believe that Victoria’s Secret is attempting to track people wearing their products.

It is true that Victoria’s Secret use passive RFID tags in many of their products. This is commonly done for reasons related to inventory or security. Many retailers use RFID tags in products for things such as preventing theft, counting high volumes of product or for preventing under-stocking or over-stocking of a particular product line.

The RFID tags “discovered” by many of the people in the videos show passive RFID tags. These are tags that do not have their own battery or power source. As such, they only work within close proximity to an RFID antenna/reader device – typically within a few metres or inches. The radio frequency transmitted from the RFID reader powers the RFID tag which can then in return transmit relevant data specific to the RFID tag.

Given their reliance on their proximity to a specific type of reader, such passive RFID tags would make for lousy tracking devices, as indeed would most types of RFID tags.

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Victoria’s Secret have already previously responded to these claims.

Like many other retailers, this technology helps us ensure we have the right products available for our customers. We only use this technology in our back room and sales floors to help us manage inventory so that our associates can efficiently support our customers’ needs.

Given that the rumours spreading online merely use the existence of an RFID tag in Victoria’s Secret products as evidence of their “this company is tracking you” brand of conspiracies – and provide no evidence that said company is actually tracking customers or any logical reason whatsoever as to why such a company would want to track their customers – we rank these claims as false.

A latter spin-off of these rumours makes the additional claim that the RFID tags are related to sex trafficking. Baseless sex trafficking rumours have been incredibly popular during 2020, including claims that work-from-home spam text messages are actually sex trafficking schemes and that WayFair has been trafficking children in plain sight on their website. However, as with all these nonsensical claims, there is no evidence provided to show any link to sex trafficking whatsoever.