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| - A video supposedly showing a multimillion dollar house owned by the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is being shared on social media with claims that the property has been destroyed by the recent Los Angeles wildfires.
But the house in the video is not owned by Mr Scholz, and a spokesperson for the German government described the claim as "fictitious". There’s no evidence Mr Scholz owns property in the United States.
The German-language video shows satellite footage of a large property, surrounded by trees, a swimming pool and a car park. A cropped image of Mr Scholz’s face, the US flag and another image of a building have been overlaid on top. The voiceover claims media reports say the whole house has burnt down and that Mr Scholz is suing “America”.
Multiple social media posts (some of which don’t actually share the video) have an English caption that says: “Germany Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants to sue the US because his house burned down‼ Olaf Scholz had a house in Los Angeles. No one in Germany knew that he had a house there worth 90 million USD. Now all of Germany is wondering where the politician got so much money. When did he buy the house?”
But a spokesperson for the German government told Full Fact that the claims in the videos are "fictitious and have no basis". Full Fact could find no reports of Mr Scholz owning any properties in Los Angeles or elsewhere in the United States.
The property shown in the satellite footage is actually a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) police academy. A search of its address shows it is owned by the local government, the City of Los Angeles. We could not see any reports in local media or from the LAPD about it being burned down in the wildfires, and, at the time of writing, no recent fires appear to have been burning nearby.
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Where does the claim come from?
The video appears to have originally been shared by a TikTok account that says in its bio: “All is fake”. We also found a slightly different version of the video on TikTok that uses the same audio and footage, but goes on to show other stock visuals of wildfires and LA. This TikTok account says in its bio: “News&PolitischeSatire”, and has also shared a video making a similar claim about former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, which says in its caption: “fake situation|satire|entertainment”.
This is not the first time we’ve seen satirical material being shared as genuine. It’s important to consider whether information you see online has been shared by credible sources.
We’ve written about other misinformation relating to the wildfires in Los Angeles, including several AI or digitally-created generated images and videos.
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