Beware before you share: Many social media posts with ‘missing’ kids, pets are actually scams

PITTSBURGH — They’re popping up on social media every few days. Posts claiming to show missing people and pets, but after taking a closer look, many of them are turning out to be fakes.

“They really target people’s heartstrings,” said Better Business Bureau of Western Pennsylvania Public Relations Director Caitlin Driscoll.

Pictures of a child, with bumps and bruises, stop you from scrolling.

“They really seem harmless to share and just an easy way to help someone local to you who’s in need,” said Driscoll.

But if you share, you could be hurting instead of helping.

“Unfortunately because you’re the one who shared the post your friends and your contacts are of course more likely to trust that content and even assume that you’re endorsing it,” said Driscoll.

It’s called a “bait and switch” scam.  An example of this scam was recently posted in Bridgeville, Carnegie, Greentree Community Group. The post is about a 2-year-old who had been found in Bridgeville and officers have no idea where he lives.  Once the post is widely shared, the scammer switches the contents of the post.

“The new post may actually be for some type of product sale, an opportunity for a job that ends up being fake, deceptive vacation listing ads for rentals are also common, even investment opportunities or surveys that guarantee that you’ll get some type of cash prize for completing them,” said Driscoll. “But regardless of what the new content states, they’re just attempts to either steal money or personal information from people.”

Back in July, the Bridgeville Police Department posted about a similar scam alert that popped up in that same community group.

“Keep an eye out for similar posts,” said Driscoll.  “You can actually and should copy and paste that post text into Facebook search tool.”

Channel 11′s Alyssa Raymond tried this. When she copied the text from the scam post and posted it in the search window on Facebook, the same post with the same pictures of a bruised child popped up. The only difference was the city mentioned in the post changed to make it seem more familiar.

“If you see a lot of posts with the same picture, and it’s the same content but being posted in different areas, different cities, definitely something is up with that situation,” said Driscoll.

Some other red flags to look for are if the commenting on the post has been turned off and if the poster just recently created a Facebook page. Also before you share anything, try a reverse image search on a website like TinEye.

“If you have shared something like this take a look at it again the next day,” said Driscoll. “Monitor it. See if the content suddenly changes. If you think you’ve shared a scam post like this delete it from your profile, notify the administrator of the particular group that you might have shared it from as well as report it to BBB scam tracker and Facebook using their posted protocols.”

Also, keep in mind that if a child really is missing, you’re likely going to see and hear about it on your local news or at least be able to confirm it with another official source.

“So if you can’t find information about this post outside of Facebook or outside of this group that should be a red flag,” said Driscoll.

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