Report of newborn baby abandoned in Barnsley is fake
What was claimed
Police have rescued a newborn baby that was abandoned in Barnsley, South Yorkshire.
Our verdict
False. The picture in the Facebook post relates to an abandoned baby case from Thailand which took place in 2017.
A post on Facebook, shared in a group for people selling items in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, claims that an abandoned newborn baby has been found by the police.
This is false.
The post, which was published on 6 August 2022, says: “A newborn baby has been found in Barnsley this morning by the police. Let us spread the word and help identifying who this newborn baby belongs to.”
The post is accompanied by two pictures of a baby wrapped in a blanket inside a cardboard box.
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But the images of the baby in the post appear to have been taken from a case which occurred in Thailand in 2017, in which an abandoned baby was rescued by police after being found in a cardboard box.
South Yorkshire Police told Full Fact: “This doesn’t link to any incident that we have. All officers have been asked and our systems have been searched when it was brought to our attention. We are confident it is a fake FB post that is circulating.”
In recent days, many similar posts have also been shared on local Facebook groups across the North America using the same picture and claiming an abandoned baby has been rescued on the morning the post is published. We have also seen a further example citing a UK location on Twitter.
Full Fact has also written about similar posts in which different pictures have been used.
Image courtesy of Dakota Corbin
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 South Yorkshire police have no record of such a case and the picture in the post was taken in Thailand in 2017.
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