What was claimed
A photo shows an elderly man who recently showed up lost at a house in Guisborough, in North Yorkshire.
Our verdict
This is a hoax post. The photo is several years old and shows a man who reportedly died in June 2019.
Facebook ‘lost man’ post shares photo of dementia patient who died in 2019
A Facebook post claims to show an elderly man who recently showed up lost at a house in Guisborough, North Yorkshire. But the post is a hoax, and the image used is several years old and actually shows a man who reportedly died in 2019.
The post [WARNING: distressing content] shares a photo of an elderly man with severe bruising on his face, including two black eyes. It was shared in a community group on 5 February, with the caption: “URGENT FLOOD YOUR FEEDS: Does anyone recognize this old man? He showed up at our house 1 hour ago here in #guisborough He is injured, I tried talking to him he doesn’t know where he is going, I think he has got dementia. Let’s flood our feeds to help find his family.”
But this photo does not show a man who has recently got lost and been injured in North Yorkshire, and there’s no evidence any such incident happened.
The photo actually appeared in a 2019 local news article about a dementia patient named William Murray, who reportedly sustained the injuries while staying at an NHS assessment unit in Milton Keynes, and he has since died.
Moreover, another sign that this is not a genuine post is that its comment section has been disabled, which Derbyshire Police Online Safety team has previously said is a sign of a hoax.
We’ve written before about similar posts falsely raising the alarm for missing children, elderly people, abandoned infants and injured dogs in Facebook community groups. Our investigation into these types of hoax posts found they’re often edited later to include links to surveys, freebies or cheap housing—you can find out more by watching an episode of BBC’s Rip Off Britain in which our investigation is featured. Our guide also offers some tips on how to identify such hoaxes.
This behaviour poses a risk to user engagement with local community groups, which can become overwhelmed with false information. We’ve written to Facebook’s parent company Meta expressing concerns about how these hoax posts can flood community groups, 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 the photo is several years old and actually shows a man who reportedly died in June 2019.