Fake police appeal to help to identify young woman with coma circulating on Portsmouth Facebook
and live on Freeview channel 276
Charity Full Fact have identified the post which shows an unconscious woman sitting in a hospital bed is fake. The caption reads: ‘We need urgent help identifying a young woman who was mugged, stabbed and left for dead on the roadside.
‘She is in a coma right now & the deputies are not able to identify her because she doesn’t have an ID on her. Let’s bump this post so it may reach people who can be able to identify her.’
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Hide AdAfter analysis by the organisation, it has been deemed not to be real. It uses a picture taken from a 2016 news article about a woman who was critically injured in a car accident in Utah, USA.
The nefarious post has been shared in local groups such as Portsmouth buy and sale everything – racking up hundreds of shares. Almost identical appeals have been circulated in groups across the UK, US and Canada.
Offering advice on how to notice misleading statements, a Full Fact spokeswoman said: ‘The phrasing of these Facebook posts is very similar to many other posts—concerning a range of false appeals including for missing children, missing pensioners and found pets—that we have checked before.
‘One way these fake posts can be identified is by checking to see if the comments are disabled, which is often done to prevent social media users from alerting other people to the fact the post isn’t genuine.’ The spokeswoman added these posts often changed to advertise surveys or housing websites after reaching a lot of people.