Appeal for missing ‘Justin Smith’ is a hoax

Hundreds of people have shared hoax appeals claiming that a nine-year-old boy named Justin Smith has gone missing. 

Full Fact has seen examples of these posts shared in Facebook groups for towns and cities all over England, including in Bristol, Bushey (Hertfordshire), Lancing (West Sussex), Grimsby (Lincolnshire), Exeter (Devon) and Gloucestershire. 

The posts all say: “Help!!! MISSING Child!! #[location]

“My grandson Justin Smith only 9years old went out on his bike earlier today and he still hasn't returned.He doesn’t know where he's going, new surroundings.

“There is a silver alert activated on him. Please help publish this post as much as possible so we can get him home safely. [sic]” 

The posts all use the same picture, of a boy holding a white dog on a lead in what appears to be a shop selling pet food. 

But this is not a real appeal, and the boy in the photo is not called Justin Smith.

The picture appears to have been taken from a genuine appeal for information about a missing 17-year-old, released by the New York State Police in July. Police have since confirmed that the teenager had been found and returned home. 

Besides the fact the picture is not of a child named “Justin Smith”, there are several other clues that all is not as it may seem in the appeal. 

Firstly, the posts have been shared by a number of different accounts all claiming to be grandparents of the same child in locations across the country, indicating that this cannot possibly be a real appeal. They also all say the child went missing “earlier today”, though they were not all posted on the same day. 

Secondly, the wording of the post is near-identical to other posts we have checked in the past—all of which claim to have been written from the perspective of a grandparent whose grandchild went missing on a bike. 

As with many of these posts, the appeal for “Justin Smith” also refers to a “silver alert”. This is a way of notifying the public about missing vulnerable people, for example people who are elderly and who have dementia or other conditions, which only operates in the US. 

Another sign that the appeals are not genuine is that almost all of them have comments disabled, which may be a method of preventing people from commenting to warn others of a hoax. It is extremely unlikely that anyone genuinely searching for information online would limit the ways in which they could be contacted, especially if they were trying to locate a missing child. 

Full Fact has previously checked many different posts on Facebook buy, sell or trade groups which falsely raise an alarm for other missing children, abandoned infants or injured dogs. These posts are often edited later to promote things like property listings, with comments frequently disabled, so that users who see what is happening are unable to call them out publicly. 

This may cause local community groups to become overwhelmed with false information and potentially result in genuine missing and lost posts being ignored or—perhaps worse—dismissed as fake. We have written to Facebook’s parent company 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 misleading images which you can read here.