A Facebook user needs help finding their father, Raymond Peterson, and stepmother Sophie, who have gone missing in different locations across the UK.
These posts are hoaxes. A reverse image search shows the couple pictured are not the people named, and they had already been found dead in California prior to the Facebook posts being published.
Multiple posts on Facebook which have been published in local community groups across the UK claim to be from someone searching for their missing father and stepmother. But the posts are hoaxes.
One of the posts, which appears in a Facebook community group for Barnsley, South Yorkshire, says: “FLOOD YOUR FEEDS ~ MISSING! Our Dad, Raymond Peterson aged 80 drove out last night with our step mom Sophie and they still haven’t returned. They were last seen in #Barnsley.
“He doesn’t know where he’s going, he has chronic memory loss. There is a silver alert activated on them. Please help bump this post so we can get them home safely.”
The posts appear in other community groups across the country with almost identical text apart from the locations, which include Rotherham, Scunthorpe, Langport in Somerset and Derry/Londonderry.
Besides the fact that people can’t go missing in so many different places at the same time, the photo attached to the posts provides clear evidence that these are not genuine appeals.
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A reverse image search shows that the couple in the photograph are actually Daniel and Stephanie Menard, both of whom went missing from a nudist resort in California. They were last seen on 24 August. Sadly the remains of both were found soon afterwards and a coroner’s office reportedly said in mid-September the couple had died from injuries to the head, some time before the Facebook posts in the UK were published. A man has been arrested and subsequently charged in connection with their deaths, and is reportedly due to appear in court on 18 October.
The hoax posts also say that a “silver alert” has been activated. This refers to a way of notifying the public about missing people who may be elderly or cognitively impaired that operates in the US—it’s unlikely the term would be used for people missing in the UK.
The posts also have their comments sections disabled, which Derbyshire Police has previously said is an indication that a post may not be genuine. It prevents other social media users from alerting people to the hoax, and a genuine post would be unlikely to prevent the sharing of potentially helpful information.
Full Fact has previously checked many different posts on Facebook buy, sell or trade groups with false alerts about missing relatives, abandoned infants or injured dogs. These posts are often later edited to promote freebies, cashback or property listings.
This behaviour poses a risk to user engagement with local community groups, which can become overwhelmed with false information. This could mean that genuine posts potentially get ignored or—perhaps worse—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 spot whether a post is likely to be a hoax which you can read here.
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 couple in the picture are not those named, and had already been found dead in California prior to the posts being published.
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