Posts on Facebook have falsely claimed that a “little boy approximately 2 years old” has been found walking at night by a police officer, either in Hereford or 170 miles away in King’s Lynn.
The post claiming this happened in Hereford was shared in a local Facebook group with more than 25,000 members, along with two photos of a child with bruises and cuts on his face.
It says: “This little boy approximately 2 years old was found last night walking behind a home here in #hereford Deputy Tyler Cooper saved him and took him to the Police Station but no one has an idea where he lives, the neighbours don’t know him or how he got there. He says his mom’s name is Ella. Let’s flood our feeds so that this post may reach his family, thank you.”
A separate post claiming the same thing happened in King’s Lynn in Norfolk is almost identical, and includes the same photos.
Neither post is true. The force responsible for Hereford, West Mercia Police, told Full Fact that there’s no record of an incident matching the description in the post, and that it doesn’t have an officer called “Tyler Cooper”. Norfolk Constabulary confirmed to us that it doesn’t have a “deputy” rank or an officer called “Tyler Cooper”.
These posts appear to be the latest example of hoax posts that we’ve seen falsely raise an alarm for missing children and 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. Both of these Facebook posts had their comments section disabled.
Our guide offers more tips for how to spot if a Facebook post is a hoax.
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.