Someone who found a dog injured in a hit and run in Bexleyheath is looking for its owner.
This is not a real appeal. The images used are of an injured dog that was rescued by a woman on a mountain in Wyoming, US, in 2018.
A post in a local Facebook group for Bexleyheath in London, shows pictures of an injured dog accompanied by an appeal for its owner, claiming the animal was hit by a car.
The post says: “Hello. If anyone is looking for this sweet boy, found him lying on the side road in #bexleyheath. He was hit by a car in a hit and run incident. I took him to the vet he is not chipped I know someone is looking for him. He definitely misses his family, I'll continue to take care of him in the meantime. Please bump this post to help me find his owner [sic]”.
But the pictures in the post are actually of an injured dog that was found by a woman hiking in Wyoming in the US in 2018.
The woman, Tia Vargas, found the springer spaniel named Boomer, on 5 July 2018, and carried him on the walk back down. After a difficult trek down with her father, they found out the dog had gone missing after falling 30 metres down a crevice a few days before and was presumed dead by his owners, who then let Ms Vargas keep the dog.
Full Fact has written about fake Facebook posts with similar wording to this one many times before.
One clue that posts like this are fake is that the comments have been turned off. This is a common tactic on hoax appeals, because it prevents people from warning other social media users that the information isn’t genuine. Derbyshire Police has previously said that having the comments turned off is an indication that the posts like these are hoaxes.
Full Fact has previously checked many different messages posted to community Facebook buy, sell or trade groups, which falsely raise an alarm for missing pensioners, abandoned infants or missing children. We’ve seen posts like these edited later to promote freebies, cashback or property listings.
This behaviour means that local groups could become overwhelmed with false information. As a result, genuine missing and lost posts could get ignored or—perhaps worse for those desperately searching for loved ones—dismissed as false. We have written to Meta expressing these concerns and asking the company to take stronger action in response to this problem.
It’s always worth checking whether content is real before you share it. We have written a guide on how to verify viral images which you can read here.
Image courtesy of Solen Feyissa
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 dog pictured wasn’t found after a hit and run in Bexleyheath.
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