What was claimed
Social media posts show a two-year-old boy who has been found and taken to a police station in East London, Wellingborough (Northamptonshire), and Northfield (Birmingham).
Our verdict
This is a hoax. Such an incident has not been recognised or recorded recently by the Metropolitan Police, West Midlands Police or Northamptonshire Police. The image in the posts dates back to 2014 and shows a boy injured in a dog attack in the United States.
Posts shared to a number of local community Facebook groups for various locations in the UK claim a two-year-old boy has been found and taken to a police station.
One such post, shared to a group for East London residents, says: “This little boy, approximately 2 years old, was found 2 hours ago in East London. Officers have the child safe at the Police Station but we have no idea where he lives. No one has called looking for him. Please Bump this post.”
Other posts shared to groups for residents in Northamptonshire and Birmingham have almost identical text, but with the location changed.
But these posts are fake. The photo included in all three posts, of a child with injuries on his face, dates back to 2014, and shows a two-year-old boy who was the victim of a dog attack in the US state of Georgia.
The Metropolitan Police told Full Fact that the image circulates online regularly but does not relate to any investigation by the force. Northamptonshire Police also told us that the post appears to be a hoax and that its press office was not aware of any such incident, while West Midlands Police also said it had received no such reports.
Other signs that these posts are not genuine is that they all have their comment sections disabled and use the phrase “please bump this post”—both of which are signs of a potential hoax, according to the online safety unit of Derbyshire Police.
We’ve written before about similar posts shared on Facebook community groups falsely raising the alarm for unidentified children, elderly people and criminals on the loose. Our 2023 investigation into these types of hoax posts found they’re often edited later to include links to surveys, freebies or cheap housing.
In February, we found these hoax posts continue to be an issue, with at least 47 communities across the UK being victim to nine different hoaxes we fact checked that month. We wrote to Meta for a second time asking it to take action.
You can find out more by watching an episode of BBC One’s Rip Off Britain in which our investigation is featured. Our guide also offers some tips on how to identify such hoaxes.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the image in these posts shows a child injured in a dog attack in the US in 2014.
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