A Facebook user is looking for their missing grandma with dementia in various locations around the UK.
The post is a hoax. It uses a photo of a woman who went missing in Wisconsin, US, in 2018 and was found the following day.
Multiple posts on Facebook are claiming to be someone searching for their missing grandma with dementia. But the posts are hoaxes.
One of the posts, which appears in a community group for Kidderminster, Worcestershire, and has over 250 shares, says: “Help!!!- MISSING!! #kidderminster My grandma who is 80 took off yesterday around 4:30 and she still hasn't returned. She’s upset because she doesn’t believe she lives in her own house so she’s trying to find her house obviously she’s confused. She doesn’t know where she’s going, she has dementia. There is a silver alert activated on her. Please help bump this post so we can get her home safely!”
The posts appear in other community groups across the country with almost identical text apart from the location, including Exeter, Hull, Preston, South Shields in Northumberlandand Silloth in Cumbria, among others. Full Fact has identified 20 examples of this post, the majority of which have been shared between 100 and 250 times at the time of writing.
Besides from the fact that a person can’t go missing in so many different places at the same time, the photo attached to the posts is a clue that they are not genuine appeals.
A reverse image search shows that the photo appears in a local news article about a 92 year old woman who was reported missing in Wisconsin, US, in 2018 and found the following morning. The photo was posted on Facebook by the Wisconsin Department of Justice.
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, have dementia or other conditions that only operates in the US–it would not be used for someone 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. This is because it prevents other social media users from alerting people to the hoax.
Full Fact has previously checked many different posts on Facebook buy, sell or trade groups which falsely raise an alarm for missing children, abandoned infants or injured dogs. These posts are later edited to promote freebies, cashback or property listings, with comments frequently disabled, so that users who see what is happening are unable to call them out publicly.
This behaviour poses a risk to user engagement with local community groups which can become overwhelmed with false information. This could mean that genuine missing and lost 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 verify viral images which you can read here.
Image courtesy of Solen Feyissa
Correction 9 August 2023
This article has been corrected to clarify who silver alerts apply to.
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 photo comes from a genuine missing person appeal in the US in 2018.
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