Hundreds share hoax post about injured dog in Dunfermline

Hundreds of people have shared a hoax Facebook post about an injured dog apparently found on a side road in Dunfermline, Scotland. 

The post, which has more than 600 shares, says: “Hello. If anyone is looking for this sweet boy, found him lying on the side road in Dunfermline.

“He was hit by a car in a hit and run incident. I took him to the vet he is not chipped I know someone is looking for him. 

“He definitely misses his family, I'll continue to take care of him in the meantime. Please bump this post to help me find his owner [sic].” 

This text appears alongside a picture of a dog with stitches across a large injury to its face. 

Since publishing this article, Full Fact has seen another example of this post shared in another part of Scotland, the town of Kirkintilloch in East Dunbartonshire. This version has more than 1,000 shares.

But this dog wasn’t found in Scotland following a hit-and-run. The picture appears to have been taken from a website for a veterinary practice based in Michigan, US, and is of a dog called Kevin who was hit by a car. 

There are several other clues that the appeal in Scotland is not genuine. Firstly, the post uses almost exactly the same wording as other fake posts about missing dogs we’ve checked in the past. 

Posts like this often claim that an unidentified dog has been found, has been taken to the vet and does not have a microchip. 

Secondly the comments on the post have been turned off, which may be a method of preventing people from commenting to warn others of a hoax. It is extremely unlikely that anyone genuinely searching for information online would limit the ways in which they could be contacted.

Fake appeals of this type are very common on Facebook, and we have previously checked very similar posts concerning missing children and vulnerable elderly people. 

These posts are often edited later to promote things like 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 appeals being ignored or dismissed as fake. We have written to Facebook’s parent company Meta expressing these concerns and asking the company to take stronger action in response to this problem. 

It’s always worth checking whether content is real before you share it. We have written a guide on how to verify misleading images which you can read here.