Reply #3: The reality is, not as many as you think.

[TheWraith]

Because you hear about this story, but you don't hear about a million plus other times when a kid asks someone for something, and it's fine. It's like child kidnappings: you hear about a handful of high profile cases that make you think it's common, and you hear lots of statistics about tens of thousands of kidnappings a year. But in actuality, some of those stats are exaggerated, and even the ones that aren't, virtually all of those kidnappings are by family members for custody dispute reasons. How many children are taken by strangers in the US every year, you think? The answer is about 150.