Facebook posts about ‘found’ boy taken to police station are hoaxes

Facebook posts sharing photos of a young child who appears to have a badly bruised face claim to show a “little boy” who has been found in different parts of the UK. But these reports are hoaxes. 

One post, with more than 5,200 shares, appeared last month in a Basingstoke community group, and said: “This little boy, estimated to be between 2-3 years old, was found about 1 hour ago in #basingstoke Officers have the child safe at the Police Station but we have no idea where he lives. No one has called in looking for him.” 

Posts sharing the same photos with almost identical wording have also appeared in community groups for Gloucester and West Yorkshire.

However the police forces operating in these areas each told Full Fact they were not aware of any reports of this nature. 

Moreover, the Facebook posts about the found toddler all have their comment sections disabled, which Derbyshire Police Online Safety team has previously said may be a sign of a hoax. 

We’ve previously written about similar posts in Facebook community groups that falsely raise the alarm for missing children, elderly people, abandoned infants and injured dogs. A Full Fact investigation found that this kind of post is often edited later to promote something completely different, such as a property listing or cashback site. 

We’ve written a guide with some tips on how to identify such hoaxes, and you can find out more by watching an episode of BBC’s Rip Off Britain in which our investigation is featured. 

This behaviour poses a risk to user engagement with local community groups, which can become overwhelmed with false information. 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.