Missing girl hoax uses photos from US of two different children

A Facebook post claiming to be looking “desperately” for the parents of a missing child is a hoax. 

The post, which appeared in a buy-and-sell community group for Bicester and Oxfordshire, says: “Desperately trying to find the parents of this sweet girl. She was picked up along side road in #Bicester. Please help bump this post so she can be reunited with her parents!! [sic]”

The post includes two photos that are allegedly of the “sweet girl”. But, reverse image searches find that, firstly, the two photos show different children, and secondly, the children are both from the US. 

The first photo originally appears in several 2019 news articles about a two-year-old girl who went missing in Michigan—and was later found after spending a night alone outdoors. This photo has also been used in similar hoax posts about a girl going missing in Bristol (Connecticut), Blount County (Tennessee) and Wheelersburg (Ohio). 

The second photo in the hoax post appears to come from a recent alert by police in California about a young boy who had been found in the city of Perris. The police confirmed he had been reunited with his parents on 1 April 2023.

The post also has near-identical text to others which instead claim that a child was found in Thanet (Kent), Oriheula Costa (Spain) and Rogiet (Wales). These posts use a different photo of a child that has been written about in a fact check by The Times of Malta earlier this month after it was claimed that the child went missing in Sliema in Malta. Again, the photo actually comes from a missing child appeal posted by police in Texas on 17 April—the little boy in the photo was reunited with his family later the same day.

These types of posts are very common on social media and we have written about them many times before, including missing children, found dogs, abandoned babies and missing pensioners 

As we have written before, one indication that a post of this type is a hoax is that the comments have been disabled, in order to stop Facebook users warning other people against sharing them. 

The motivation behind these posts isn’t always clear, but we’ve previously seen them 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 Yuri Samoilov