A man called Martin Jones, who has dementia and is 79, has been reported missing in Grimsby.
This is false. Humberside Police have not issued a missing persons appeal for this man, and the picture used in the post has previously been used on social media to claim that a caravan has been stolen.
A post on Facebook with over 150 shares claims a man called Martin Jones is missing in Grimsby.
The post claims: “URGENT- MISSING! #grimsby My uncle Mr Martin Jones aged 79 drove out yesterday with our dog Baxter and he hasn't returned. He doesn’t know where he’s going, he has dementia. There is a silver alert activated on him. Please help me bump this post so I can get him home safely”.
The image shows a man with a dog on the lead standing next to a small caravan.
But the claim is false. The image has featured in other Facebook posts that have claimed the caravan in the picture had been stolen in the US.
Humberside Police told Full Fact that details of high risk missing people are published on their website. There are no reports of a missing man called Martin Jones on the force’s website, Facebook or Twitter.
Another clue that this post is fake is that it mentions a “silver alert”—a system designed to notify the public about missing people who may be elderly, have dementia or other conditions—that only operates in the US.
Full Fact has previously checked posts with very similar wording that claim a man called ‘Martin Jones’ is missing, but use different images that have been taken from elsewhere on the internet. We were not able to find the original picture in this case.
These claims are often posted to community Facebook buy, sell or trade groups, and have also falsely raised an alarm for 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 Brett Jordan
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 a 79-year-old man with dementia called Martin Jones has not gone missing in Grimsby.
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