A 12-year-old girl called Shelly Sheridan has gone missing in the UK.
False. We’ve found no reports of a missing girl of that name in any of the locations mentioned in the posts claiming this, and the accompanying image is of an older girl who briefly went missing in the US earlier this year.
A series of Facebook posts claiming that a 12-year-old girl named Shelly Sheridan has gone missing are hoaxes.
One post, which appears in a Facebook community group for those living in Dewsbury and Batley in West Yorkshire says: “Please Help!! Everyone I’m a desperate mom asking every member of the community to help me find my daughter Shelly Sheridan (12) who has not returned home for 3 days now. It only takes a few seconds of your time to share! #dewsbury name is: Shelly Sheridan Age:12 Height: 5'1 Weight: 105 Brown Hair & Hazel Eyes.
“Last seen wearing that grey minie mouse sweater, black trousers , Grey sneakers. Please bump this post and help bring my Sarah home [sic].”
Posts with nearly identical text, save for the location hashtag, have been shared in Facebook groups for other places across England, including Stockport, Hereford and Leeds, all claiming the missing girl was last seen there.
All the versions of the post we have seen refer to the missing girl as Sarah instead of Shelly in the final line.
However, the details in these posts are false. We’ve not been able to find any police reports in the named locations of a missing girl matching the description in the posts. In addition, a reverse image search shows the girl in the picture included in the posts is not 12 years old, not named Shelly or Sarah Sheridan and not missing anywhere in the UK.
The picture is actually of a 16-year-old girl named Rayahna Miller, who went missing in the US state of Kentucky earlier this year. Soon afterwards local police confirmed that she had been found safe.
We’ve written before about similar posts falsely raising the alarm for missing people, abandoned infants and injured dogs in Facebook community groups. Our investigation into these types of hoax posts found they’re often edited later to include links to surveys, freebies or cheap housing. In February, we found these hoax posts continue to be an issue, with at least 47 communities across the UK being victim to nine different hoaxes we fact checked that month.
You can find out more by watching an episode of BBC One’s Rip Off Britain in which our investigation is featured. Our guide also offers some tips on how to identify such hoaxes.
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 image is of a girl who went missing in the US state of Kentucky earlier this year and has since been found safe.
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