Facebook 'missing child' scam designed to pull at your heartstrings

• Facebook scammers are fabricating missing children posts, in an effort to steal user information
• The Lincoln Police Department said these scams are taking time away from real missing persons cases
• Watch to learn how to identify these scams

BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT:
As neighbors and Nebraskans it's in our nature to help, but when scrolling online and seeing a heartfelt post about a missing child pressing share may be more harmful in the long run.

Tuesday KMTV was sent a post of a young boy, the post claims the child went missing here in Nebraska. The post also stated he was diagnosed with Autism and needs daily medical assistance.

However, the Lincoln Police Department PIO Manager Erykah Thomas says there is no record of the child.

"I was able to look up the name of the individual that was put in the post saying that they were missing and we're able to find that in our system. We don't even have anyone by that name, let alone a missing person's case," said Thomas.

The post was completely fabricated, and after being reverse image searched the post, KMTV found it was a scam that has been circulating across the county for years.

Thomas says after posting about the scam on LPD's Facebook page two other law agencies said they'd also been targeted.

"When I made my post about this being fake, I noticed that both the Evansville Police Department in Indiana and the Liberal Police Department in Kansas made similar posts saying that their agencies were being targeted and that they had had posts going out saying that this exact same child with the same photos was missing in their jurisdiction," said Thomas.

KMTV went back to Facebook group 'NE Buy, Sell & Trade' and saw another post, this time from Friday, claiming another young boy was missing. After tracing the photos KMTV found that it was actually a missing boy from Texas, not Nebraska, who had been reunited with his family back in March.

"And so we just want to be able to focus our attention as a law enforcement agency on helping those families who make legitimate missing persons reports and not having to turn our attention to misinformation that's spreading online. Social media can be used for lots of good things, but it can also be used for lots of negative things," said Thomas.

Thomas says scammers encourage users to share and once the posts begin trending they change the content of the posts. Often times sharing links that steal users private information.

"Usually legitimate missing persons posts are not going to originate from a Buy sell Trade group on Facebook. Also, if they have the comments turned off, and there's not a way for people to interact with that post and ask more questions about this quote unquote missing person,said" Thomas.

If you think a post is a scam do not interact with it and if a post has an external link don't click on it.