No evidence viral picture of ‘migrant lorry’ stopping on M62 is real

An image was widely shared on Facebook last month with claims that it showed migrants getting out of a lorry on the M62. But there’s no evidence that it’s a real image, and it has a digital watermark which suggests it was created or at least edited with AI tools.

One version of the post, shared over 1,000 times, has the caption: “M62 this morning migrants leave the back of this van the driver stopped after hearing banging in the back! All fleeing war torn France!”

Another viral post shared on 11 June includes a caption saying: “Bit of a hold-up on the M62 this morning after a migrant lorry was stopped. Traffic's slow but moving.”

We checked the picture for evidence it was AI-generated, and found it contained an invisible SynthID watermark indicating it was “generated with OpenAI tools” such as ChatGPT, the OpenAI API or Codex.

This suggests that the image was either created or edited in some way with AI—but we don’t know which, so we can’t say for sure if it was entirely fabricated or a real image was edited.

And if it was edited, we can’t be sure how much of the image was edited. Sometimes even minor edits such as brightening can result in an image being watermarked. And the stretch of motorway shown in the image does look as though it could match part of the M62 near Middleton, in Greater Manchester.

However, there are also other visual clues in the image which suggest it may have been created or at least substantially edited with AI, such as the way some of the people standing in the road are depicted, as well as faces being distorted, and glitches like a foot appearing to merge with markings on the road.

We’ve also found no other evidence to suggest that the image, which was supposedly taken on 11 June, is real.

We asked National Highways, which maintains and operates the country’s motorways and major A-roads and manages congestion and incidents, whether it had any record of a lorry carrying migrants stopping on the M62, which runs between Liverpool and Hull, that day.

A spokesperson told us that “there is no log of this incident occurring”.

We also couldn’t find any examples of credible sources sharing the image, or media reports of such an event occurring, or any other pictures on social media supposedly showing the same incident.

However, police have previously stopped lorries on the M62 as part of a crackdown on immigration crime. The Manchester Evening News reported that such an operation was carried out in November 2024.