A man called Todd is searching for his birth mother who is pictured in an old photograph.
This is a hoax. The photograph is a stock image taken from a picture editing website. The same user has posted the appeal in different Facebook groups claiming the man was adopted in different places.
Posts on Facebook claiming that the social media user’s husband is looking for their birth mother, along with a picture of the woman concerned, are hoaxes.
The posts say: “My husband Todd is looking for his birth mother and any siblings. He was born March 18, 1963 in [location] and that is also where he was adopted. The only thing he knows about his mother is she played the organ at a Nazarene Church. Please find it in your heart to help my husband locate his family by sharing this post. Thank you”.
The posts use a sepia-toned image of a young woman that appears to be a scan of an old photograph with frayed edges. However, the image has been taken from an image editing website, with an advertised “old photo effect” used on it. The website shows the same woman with dozens of different photo effects.
The fact that the same picture with almost identical text appears in three different local Facebook groups is also a clue the appeal is fake. The same user claims in multiple different groups that their husband was adopted in different places, including Selby and Barnsley in Yorkshire as well as Worksop and Mansfield which are both Nottinghamshire.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen fake claims about searches for birth parents appear in community Facebook buy, sell or trade groups. We often also see false claims about abandoned babies 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, people genuinely trying to trace relatives or look for missing people 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 Glenn Carstens-Peters
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 this ‘appeal’ uses a stock image of the person it is supposedly seeking out.
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