An 82-year-old father with dementia has gone missing after driving off with a dog called Cami.
This is false. The man pictured is Vern English, a taxi driver from California who died in 2022 and whose image has been used in hoax posts before.
A heartfelt appeal to find a father who has dementia and has gone missing with his dog is being shared on Facebook community groups in the UK, America and Australia. But the appeal is a hoax.
One Facebook post in a community group for Doncaster says: “Our Dad, Jackson Simmons aged 82 drove out last night with our dog Cami and he still hasn’t returned. He doesn’t know where he’s going, he has dementia. There is a silver alert activated on him. Please help bump this post so we can get him home safely.”
The picture accompanying the post shows an older man with a moustache sitting in a car, which appears to have the steering wheel on the left, alongside a black dog.
Almost identical appeals have been shared on a number of different community Facebook groups, with different users claiming “Jackson Simmons” has gone missing in locations including Myrtle Beach in South Carolina, Quinns Rock in Australia, and Invergordon in Scotland.
But the man pictured is not “Jackson Simmons”, but an American called Vern English who lived in Sonoma County, California.
The image used in the Facebook post can be traced through a reverse image search to an online fundraising page created for Mr English in January 2021.
The retired founder of a successful local taxi firm, Mr English died in August 2022.
The text of the post now circulating in different local Facebook groups asks people to “flood your feeds” with the appeal. Use of this kind of phrase, requests to “bump” a post and the comments being turned off are often clues that the appeal is a hoax.
Full Fact has previously written about many other hoax posts concerning missing elderly people–including several different fake appeals using Vern English’s image–which all follow the same pattern claiming the person has dementia or other conditions, was walking a dog and now cannot be found.
Moreover, it’s also common to see such posts referring to a “silver alert” being activated. The silver alert system is designed to notify the public about missing vulnerable people, for example those who are elderly, but it only operates in the US. Real appeals for a missing person in the UK are unlikely to use the term.
Hoax posts are common in local Facebook groups
Hoax posts can also come in a variety of other forms including abandoned babies, missing children and injured pets. We often find they use similar phrasing such as “flood your feeds” and “bump this post”.
You can read more about how to spot Facebook hoax posts using our guide here. We’ve also published an investigation into how and why these posts are shared so widely.
In many cases, once a hoax post has generated engagement, the author will use Facebook’s editing function to change it into something completely different, such as a survey, property listing or an advert for a cashback site.
These types of posts can cause local community groups to become overwhelmed with false information and could potentially mean genuine appeals are ignored or—perhaps worse—dismissed as fake.
We’ve written to Meta expressing these concerns and asking the company to take stronger action in response to this problem.
Image courtesy of Creative Commons
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 the man pictured is not a missing father with dementia, but an American taxi driver who died in 2022.
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