A three-year-old girl called Mila was found wandering in Derby and taken to a police station.
There’s no evidence this occurred. Derbyshire Constabulary told Full Fact it had no record of this, and the wording of the post is almost identical to other social media posts we’ve seen circulating in the UK and in multiple cities abroad.
Since we first wrote about it earlier this month, we’ve seen another example shared on Facebook of a hoax post claiming a three-year-old girl was found wandering and taken to a local police station.
The post features an image of a young girl who seems to be asleep, and who has a scar-like mark on her face.
The text of the post says: “This 3 year old baby girl, Mila, was found last night walking behind a home here in #derby.
“Deputy Sara Thomas saved her and took her to the Police Station but no one has an idea where she lives, the neighbours don’t know her or how she got there. She says her mom’s name is Abigail”.
The post then includes an appeal for people to “flood our feeds so that this post may reach her family”.
Derbyshire Constabulary told us it had “no records relating to this”.
These posts are virtually identical to others we’ve written about that claimed a three-year-old called Mila was “found walking behind a home” in Poole, Dorset, but the location has been changed to “#derby”.
When we asked Dorset Police about the previous post, it told us it had no record of a “child being presented as lost/missing at Poole Station on 16 September 2024”.
We’ve also found examples of other Facebook posts shared abroad that use different photos and names but feature almost identical wording.
Full Fact has previously checked many different posts on Facebook buy, sell or trade groups which falsely raise an alarm for missing children and elderly people, abandoned infants or injured dogs. These posts are often edited later to promote cashback or property listings, with comments frequently disabled, so that users who see what is happening are unable to call them out publicly.
This may cause local community groups to become overwhelmed with false information and potentially result in genuine appeals being ignored or dismissed as fake. We have previously written to Facebook’s parent company Meta expressing these concerns and asking the company to take stronger action in response to this problem.
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 we’ve seen a nearly identical post shared in other locations around the world, and Derbyshire Constabulary said it has no record of this occurring.
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