What was claimed
A young boy was found wandering in Skegness on 4 November and taken to a police station.
Our verdict
This is likely a hoax post. Lincolnshire Police said it has no reports of this happening.
Facebook post about a toddler found wandering in Skegness is false
26 November 2024
A post shared over 100 times on Facebook claims a young boy was found wandering in Skegness, Lincolnshire and taken to a police station on 4 November 2024.
However, Lincolnshire Police told us it has no report of this. We suspect this post is a hoax, as its wording is very similar to others we’ve seen and written about before.
The post reads: “This little boy, approximately 3 years old, was found 1 hour ago here in #Skegness.
“Officers have the child safe at the Police Station but we have no idea where he lives. No one has called looking for him. Let’s flood our feeds so this post can reach his family….IT ONLY TAKES 2 SECONDS TO SHARE!”.
Lincolnshire Police said it couldn’t find any reports matching this in the Skegness area on 4 November.
We’ve seen the exact same post shared in another Facebook group, but with the hashtag for Skegness replaced by a hashtag for Dublin. The same image has also reportedly appeared in similar posts in the United States.
We’ve also found examples of other Facebook posts shared abroad that use different photos and names but feature similar wording.
These posts appear to be the latest examples of hoax posts that we’ve seen falsely raising the alarm for missing children, elderly people, abandoned infants and injured dogs in Facebook community groups.
Our investigation into these sorts of hoax posts last year found that they’re often edited later to promote something completely different, such as a property listing or cashback site, with comments frequently disabled to prevent users calling them out publicly. This Facebook post also had its comments section disabled.
This behaviour poses a risk to user engagement with local community groups, which can become overwhelmed with false information. This could mean that genuine posts potentially get ignored or—perhaps worse—dismissed as false. We’ve written to Facebook’s parent company Meta expressing concerns about how these hoax posts can flood community groups, and asking the company to take stronger action in response to this problem.
Our guide offers more tips on how to spot if a Facebook post is a hoax.
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 Lincolnshire Police has no report of this happening.