Unpacking claims that 17 people went missing in Atlanta after job interviews set up through Indeed

In mid-April 2025, claims (archived) circulated online that 17 people went missing in Atlanta after going to job interviews set up through Indeed, a job listing site.

One TikTok user said:

Y'all, did y'all hear about 17 people have came up missing in Atlanta after they did an application on Indeed and was offered an interview? They went to their interview and no one ever heard from them ever since. This is scary, and we've gotta be careful, well, everybody's gotta be careful. If you applying on Indeed, be careful.

The claim circulated mainly (archived) on (archived) TikTok (archived) but also was popular on Facebook (archived). Snopes readers wrote in to ask whether the claim was true.

However, it was not possible to independently verify the details of the claim at the time of this writing. The Atlanta Police Department said on April 14 that while there had been four missing-persons reports in the past seven days, none matched the details given in the online claims. We found no credible news sources reporting the disappearances. The specifics of the claim also appeared inconsistent across postings, with no clear details of the age or gender of the applicants or the nature of the job they were applying for.

Indeed said via email:

We are aware of recent claims circulating online about missing individuals connected to job postings on our platform. These claims are unverified, and to date, we have seen no evidence to support them. We have not received any official reports or been contacted by law enforcement or other authorities about these allegations.

We also reached out to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and The Committee for Missing Children, two charities that work to find missing children, to ask if they had verified the claims, as some claims said the missing people were teenagers. We will update this story if we receive a response.

The claim began circulating (archived) around April 9, 2025, and was being repeated by users on TikTok (archived) and Facebook at the time of this writing.

However, different iterations of the claim generally featured inconsistent details. For example, an early claim posted on April 9, didn't specify the ages of the people who purportedly disappeared. However, some later claims referenced (archived) "nieces and nephews" or told (archived) "mothers and fathers" to beware of their children attending interviews arranged through Indeed. Other later (archived) claims said the people who disappeared were teenagers.

It was also unclear what job the applicants were allegedly interviewing for. One posting of the claim mentioned an interview at a "warehouse" at 7 p.m. but provided no further details. Another uploader (archived) also gave these details, though in reference to a separate but similar unverified story.

As the claim progressed, social media users also added content to repostings of popular videos. For example, one video posted on April 10, 2025, was shared again on April 12 with a poster showing missing children in Atlanta that was not in the original video.

The poster was identical to one used (archived) by the Save Our Adolescents From Prostitution project in 2019. Social media users noted this discrepancy while looking at the listed children's ages, which were correct in 2019 but not in 2025. For example, the poster listed one child as born in 2002 as 16 years old. The group confirmed via email that the poster was from 2019, describing it as "super old and not current."

Indeed said via email that its Trust and Safety team reviews and removes "tens of millions of job posts that don't meet our strict quality standards" every month and referred concerned users to its Guidelines for a Safe Job Search page. 

Reference: Yahoo News: Laerke Christensen