A TikTok creator posted a viral video saying she was followed into a Costco parking lot by a random van. She urges viewers to be more aware of their surroundings.
Gabrielle Moses (@gabrielle_moses) has reached over 11 million views and 948,000 likes on her video by Friday. Her video is filmed inside her house after the interaction. “So, I just had to call 911,” she says. “I’m OK. I’m safe, but this is a reminder to always check your surroundings.”
“You hear these stories, and you think, ‘That will never happen to me,'” she adds. “It happened to me today.” She says she’s telling her story so viewers “know what to look out for.”
First, Moses says she stopped at a stoplight and saw “a black Porsche” behind her car and to the right while she was out running errands. “So it’s not in the same lane as me,” she clarifies.
However, “There’s a van behind me, directly,” she adds. “I see this Porsche start pointing at my car that I’m driving, and honking, but he’s not looking directly at me; he’s looking at the person in the van behind me.”
Moses says the only reason she was paying attention at that moment was because the person driving the Porsche was honking. She says the Porsche disappeared once she began driving again, so she didn’t “think anything of it.”
However, Moses says she noticed the van was still driving directly behind her after making a few turns. “I just had a weird freaking gut feeling … after they were pointing, and like, I saw the communication happening,” she explains.
Moses says she decided to make a few more turns to see if the person driving the van was really following her. “They were,” she says.
She says she started to Google police stations near her at that point. “They were pretty far,” she says, “so instead of going to the police station, I go to the most public place, the most busy place I could think of, which was really close to me. It was a Costco.”
Moses says the van was still following her when she arrived at Costco, so she started to drive in circles around the parking lot. “I pull into a spot, and I sprint inside of Costco thinking, ‘They won’t be waiting for me.'”
“I was wrong,” she says. “They waited,” despite the fact that she was “wasting time” in the store for around half an hour.
Moses says that when she decided to leave the store, she immediately saw the van in the parking lot and started to record. She added the video she took at Costco to her TikTok video.
The video shows the white van circling around the Costco parking lot. “The van is right there. Look at him,” she says in the clip.
“It was looking for the car I was driving,” Moses adds. “I had already memorized like everything about the car; it was a U-Haul.” She adds that the van had “no front license plate” but it did have numbers on the front that she assumed was a “rental number.”
“So then I just immediately get into the car. I dial 911, and they said that they could get cops to me,” she continues. “But at that point, like, I was driving around the parking lot making sure that I didn’t see the van again. And so by the time I didn’t see the van, I left, and I was still on the phone with the dispatchers.”
Looking back at it, Moses says that leaving the parking lot perhaps “was not the smartest thing to do.”
“Maybe I should have gone back inside and called the cops, but I was scared of them, like, trying to come up to me while I was walking back inside or me staying in the car,” she explains.
Before ending her video, Moses assures the audience, “I’m good. I filed the report, I talked to the dispatch, police might be coming here later, and I took videos of the car and everything, so just be safe.”
@gabrielle_moses ALWAYS be aware of your surroundings
♬ original sound – Gabrielle Moses
A viewer in the comments section asked Moses, “Why didn’t you call the police while you were in Costco?”
Moses responded in a video, saying she didn’t call 911 sooner because “I am already an overthinker and paranoid about my own safety a lot of times.”
“I thought I was making up a situation in my head, and I didn’t wanna cause a scene or inconvenience anyone if I was literally just overthinking and it not being an actual issue,” she adds.
If you think you’re being followed, police say the first thing you should do is “Trust your gut” and “be aware of what’s going on around you,” according to the Tri-County Times. “Safety is the number one priority.”
“Walk to the front of the store, where the majority of the people are,” the article continues. “Walk up to an employee, say ‘I’m being followed.'”
The Daily Dot reached out to Moses via email.
The internet is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter here to get the best (and worst) of the internet straight into your inbox.