A Sydney jeweller, a stolen necklace and the fallout that followed.

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When Amy posted a video about her small jewellery business, she was just after some advice. Hours later, she was trapped in a social media storm.

On Monday, Amy, the owner of Luna Rae Jewellery, posed a question to her TikTok followers.

"What would you do in this situation?" Amy began the video.

"A customer purchased a diamond and gold necklace. It was $360. She bought it. All went well. We sent it out. Fine. Several weeks later, our Shopify account came to us and said, 'The customer's done a chargeback on this. She never got it.' Which was news to us."

Watch: Amy on the influencer that allegedly stole from her small business. Post continues after video.

According to Amy, the customer never reached out about her order and, on the brand's end, the necklace appeared to have been delivered two days after it was purchased.

"Somehow, I'm not sure how she did it. She proved to them that she never got the product and they favoured her," Amy continued the video. "She got the chargeback approved and got refunded. We lost the necklace. We lost the money."

Wondering what went wrong, Amy and her husband Chris, who co-owns the jewellery business, did some digging.

That's when Chris found the customer on social media… and she was wearing the necklace.

"She is an influencer. She has been on a reality show," Amy said, but gave no further details about the customer's identity.

After posting the video, Amy went back to work, putting it out of her mind.

But just four hours later, her story had spread like wildfire.

"We were having lunch and my TikTok girl was like, 'Oh my god, this thing is blowing up'," Amy told Mamamia.

The jewellery brand owner was stunned. 

"We post on TikTok every day to not much avail. We're not a very big brand; we don't have that much of a following. We don't really get comments."

Oh but, this time, there were comments.

Thousands of them, in fact. Most were speculating about the identity of the influencer, while others were encouraging Amy to take legal action. 

At first, the small business owner was happy to see a "discussion point trending".

But the excitement was fleeting.

The comments soon turned into a witch hunt to find the influencer, with people naming and tagging former reality stars in the comments.

"It wasn't until that night that we were like, 'Whoa, this is getting quite nasty. People are blaming people'," Amy said.

"We're going through and deleting comments. Call me naive, but it didn't even occur to me that it was an invitation for people that would actually just go start accusing people with zero proof."

Some comments criticised Amy for "gatekeeping" the influencer's name, while others accused her of "rage-baiting" by fabricating the story for publicity.

"I don't even know what rage bait is," Amy said, adding that she was "just annoyed" about the situation with the influencer and wanted advice.

"It just rubbed us the wrong way, and we were just having a vent about it and asking for opinions. We thought maybe 10 small businesses would have related or given us advice.

"We had zero idea that it would turn into what it has. It all got completely out of hand."

As the pile-on continued, Amy scrambled to control the damage and absolve innocent influencers. But people wouldn't let up until they got a name.

"It became more about, 'Oh, you're just letting everybody else suffer," Amy said. "And it's like, we're not trying to… we haven't accused these people."

"I feel like we were taking the heat simply because we refused to pass the heat on to someone else. But, can you imagine what would have happened to that girl if we had given that name? I'm not going to be responsible for anyone targeting someone, and if people were targeting people without our permission, then all we could try to do was control it."

Amy and Chris thought about deleting the post, but worried it would simply make things worse.

"It was at that point that we started to be like, we don't want to be involved in this anymore, but we felt really trapped," Amy said.

Every move, from turning off comments to posting again, seemed too risky.

When Amy suggested turning off the comments, she was warned it would seem like she was "hiding something".

"Do we post again? Nope. That's going to fuel it. Do we turn the comments off? No, that's going to make you look like you're hiding everything bad. There's no way out."

So the posts and comments stayed, and the backlash intensified.

"Hate at that level is a lot for anyone to handle," said Amy. "It's getting really personal now and it's getting really hateful. We actually don't know how to handle it. It's just crazy."

The couple's small business has also been impacted.

"We've had to remove our address from Google for safety. We've had people threatening to come here. We've had many one-star reviews saying that our business is unethical. People are actively trying to destroy a small Australian business because some person started a rumour that we're lying, and they've just chosen to believe it with no proof."

While the situation has made Amy hesitant to use social media to market her business, she knows it's necessary.

"I'm very scared to post. I'm obviously going to be extremely careful, I feel like I can't ever talk about anything controversial again," she said. "But we can't not do TikTok as an online brand, that's how we're going to grow.

"We're going to have to just carry on and hope that the haters go away… I can't see anything else we're going to do, but I just want to fast-forward to that because it's a horrible time right now. We're just going to have to hope this doesn't destroy a business that we've been building for six years."

Feature Image: Instagram/TikTok/@lunaraejewellery