Missing child hoax posts use picture from supermarket shopping accident

Posts on Facebook community groups falsely claim to be seeking help to identify an injured child who has been found and taken to a police station. 

One of the posts, which appears on a community group for those living in the Preston area, says: “This is krazy asf This little boy, approximately 2 years old, was found 1 hour ago here in Preston Officers got the child safe at the Station but we have no idea where he stays. No one has phoned looking for him. Please Bump this post.”

Other posts, such as those published on groups for Bradford in West Yorkshire and Poole in Dorset, have nearly identical text with only the locations changed.

All the posts are accompanied by an image of a sad-looking young child with blood around his nose. 

Although the posts claim the child was found only an hour earlier, this image originally appeared in a story published by the Sun newspaper in October 2017 about a three-year-old boy who was injured when a shopping trolley reportedly flipped over on a supermarket travelator in Chatham, Kent. 

These posts all have the comments turned off, which can be an indication that a post is a hoax. 

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.

Hoaxes pose a risk to user engagement with local community news because groups can become overwhelmed with false information. As a result, genuine posts may be ignored or dismissed as false.

We’ve written to Meta asking the company to take stronger action in response to this problem.