It's the kind of story that makes news headlines: "I was coming out of one of my favorite stores, Five Below, when I heard what sounded like someone screaming."
Barb Thompson didn't see the story on 10TV or in The Columbus Dispatch, but on Facebook.
The post's author says he was in the Polaris area, leaving the store Five Below, when he saw what appeared to be an attempted kidnapping.
He writes, "I noticed a female on the ground and a guy dragging her by the hair...One of the officers said he believed it had something to do with human trafficking. They were trying to kidnap her."
Glenn McEntyre: "It's a shocking story, right?"
Thompson: "Sure. especially when it's talking about human trafficking and stuff like that. And so I just re-posted it because I thought it was important for people to know."
There's one problem: The two police agencies with jurisdiction over that area, the Delaware County Sheriff's Office and Columbus Police, say they have no record of the incident happening.
"Certainly if something of this magnitude occurred, we would hope that these folks would come to the police, report it, we would know about it. We would go out and investigate. That's not the case here," said Columbus Police Sergeant Dave Pelphrey.
He says some variation of this story pops up on local Facebook feeds a few times a year.
"I think at some point in time all of our central Ohio malls have been victimized by these false Facebook posts."
Asked whether any of them turn out to be true, Pelphrey said, "No. No." Thompson was far from the only person to share the post.
"It was very believable," she said.
She says her only intention, was increasing awareness of what she believed to be a public safety concern.
"I wouldn't want to put something out there that wasn't true. So that's what's disheartening about it," she said.
Pelphrey said in this instant-information era, it's best to look to law enforcement and reputable news outlets and look for verifiable information before you share.
"The fact that a lot of these posts refer to abductions of children and we have no knowledge, the public has no knowledge, the media has no knowledge, that's a good way of debunking the stories right then and there."
The Delaware County Sheriff's Office went as far as posting a statement on its Facebook page, calling the post "false."
10TV spoke to the man who authored the original post.
He stands by his story, saying he only posted it because he thought people should know. He said he posted it to his personal page and was surprised at how widely it had been shared.