It was just an ordinary Wednesday afternoon for shoppers at a San Jose Target store, when suddenly, sexually explicit audio started to play over the speaker system.
Cell phone videos captured by shocked shoppers recorded the moaning, groaning and pornographic, profanity-laced phrases being broadcast throughout the store.
At first, Chris Minor was stunned and confused.
“I thought it may have been Halloween related, maybe an employee playing games,” Minor said in an interview with CBS. “But this was X-rated material, which made me feel very uncomfortable. I was taken aback, very frustrated, appalled and angered by what I heard.”
Local mommy blogger Bethany Curran also witnessed the incident that she said lasted for 15 minutes.
“I heard female voices making sexual noises and telling each other ‘do this’ and ‘do that,’” Curran told Contra Coast Times.
“My [4-year-old] son asked me, ‘Why are they hurting the ladies?’ and I said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s OK.’”
Curran said she was disappointed by the employees’ reactions. She claims most just laughed and recorded the spectacle on their phones.
But Gina Young, another mother who was shopping at Target with her young twin sons, wrote on her Facebook page that employees were scrambling around to stop the audio.
“Employees were running around everywhere. Picking and hanging up phones, which worked…for about two minutes before it started up again,” she wrote. “People were screaming at employees, video taping, some laughing, some disgusted. It was terribly awkward.”
The store did eventually apologize to shoppers over the PA system, but many are demanding an explanation.
A spokesperson for Target said that there is an investigation underway, and that they are taking the situation “very seriously.”
A similar incident occurred at another California Target store in July and shoppers were evacuated when the pornographic audio was played.
Police were called to investigate, but Sgt. Sean Gillham of the San Luis Obispo Police Department told Global News in an email that there were “no additional leads or information regarding the hacking incident.”
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