A three-year-old girl called Mila was found walking alone in Poole and was taken to the police station.
False. Dorset Police has no record of this occurring, and the wording of the Facebook post is almost identical to other social media posts seen in multiple cities abroad.
A post shared more than 100 times on Facebook claims a three-year-old girl was found alone in a street in Poole, and taken to a police station.
But Dorset Police has no record of this occurring, and the post is virtually identical to others we’ve seen shared in locations around the USA, and in Trinidad and Tobago.
The Facebook post features an image of a young girl, seemingly asleep, with a dummy in her mouth and a scar-like mark on her face.
It was shared in the UK in a Facebook group called ‘Bournemouth , Poole, Christchurch :Advertising, Buy and Sell [sic]’ on 17 September, alongside a caption that said the “3 year old baby girl, Mila, was found walking behind a home here in #poole”.
It continued: “Deputy Sara Thomas saved her and took her to the Police Station but no one has an idea where she lives, the neighbours don’t know her or how she got there. She says her mom’s name is Abigail”, alongside an appeal for people to “flood our feeds so that this post may reach her family”.
The image and the text of the post are identical to posts we’ve seen shared elsewhere, with “#poole” replaced by the name of five US locations—Utah, Chicago, Anchorage, Louisville, and Fort Worth—and Maraval, Trinidad and Tobago.
Dorset Police told Full Fact it couldn’t find any record of a “child being presented as lost/missing at Poole Station on 16 September 2024”.
We’ve also found examples of other Facebook posts shared abroad that use different photos and names but also feature almost identical wording.
Full Fact has previously checked many different posts on Facebook buy, sell or trade groups which falsely raise an alarm for other missing children, abandoned infants or injured dogs. These posts are often edited later to promote property listings, with comments frequently disabled, so that users who see what is happening are unable to call them out publicly.
This may cause local community groups to become overwhelmed with false information and potentially result in genuine missing and lost posts being ignored or—perhaps worse—dismissed as fake. We have previously written to Facebook’s parent company Meta expressing these concerns and asking the company to take stronger action in response to this problem.
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 Dorset Police told us it has no record of a child being presented to Poole Police Station on the date claimed in the post.
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