Pictured child not ‘saved’ by police in Hartlepool

A Facebook post sharing two photos of a young boy with cuts and bruises on his face claims he was “found walking behind a home” in Hartlepool. But this is a hoax. 

The post, which appears in a local community group says: “This little boy approximately 3 years old was found last night walking behind a home here in #hartlepool Officer Sam Jenson saved him and took him to the Police Station but no one has an idea where he lives, the neighbours don't know him or how he got there. He says his mom's name is Ella. Let's flood our feeds so that this post may reach his family, thank you.”

This did not happen. 

For one thing, Cleveland Police, who are responsible for Hartlepool in County Durham, told Full Fact that the force does not have an officer by this name. 

And there are other signs that this post is a hoax. The day before it was shared, another post with the same photos claimed the boy had been found in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. This post, which has more than 23,000 shares, is identical except for details about the location, and the names of the alleged police officer and mother. We could find no credible media reports of any such incident in Rotterdam. 

And in Montana in the US, local media reported that a post with the same picture was being shared earlier this month, and that police confirmed the story hadn’t happened there either.

We’ve recently written about other posts sharing almost identical text with photos of a different child. Police forces for those areas also told Full Fact that they had no record of this incident or the police officer named in the post. 

We’ve come across hoax posts like these many times, including different versions that all falsely raise an alarm for missing children and elderly people, abandoned infants and injured dogs in Facebook community groups. 

A Full Fact investigation found that they’re often edited once they’ve been widely liked or shared to promote something completely different, such as a property listing or cashback site. 

Often these sorts of hoax posts have their comments section disabled, which prevents users calling them out publicly. Both of these Facebook posts had their comments section disabled. 

These hoax posts can do real harm. They can cause local community groups to become overwhelmed with false information, which could lead to real posts and information being ignored or dismissed as fake. 

We’ve written to Facebook’s parent company Meta outlinting these concerns and asking them to take stronger action in response to this problem.