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| - Facebook posts claim to show photos of hospitalised women who were supposedly found stabbed in Bradford, West Yorkshire, and Honiton, Devon, recently. But the photos shared are from other incidents in the US, and the relevant local police forces have confirmed the claims aren’t genuine.
One post was shared in a Facebook community group for Bradford and West Yorkshire on 19 February, and said: “We need urgent assistance in identifying this woman found last night heavily stabbed multiple times and dumped in her Black Audi A7 sedan by the canal here in #bradford She's in critical condition and missing her ID's/ Drivers Licence, No phone, No nothing Let’s flood our feeds so that this post reaches her family. Thank you [sic]”.
The post includes a photo of a woman lying in a hospital bed, with what appears to be a breathing tube and various monitoring wires, but she was not found stabbed in Bradford on 18 February. The picture was shared in a 2019 video report by Australian outlet 9News about the recovery of a 23-year-old woman who was severely injured in a car accident in South Australia in 2017.
West Yorkshire Police have confirmed this Facebook post is a hoax.
An almost identical post was shared on 20 February, this time claiming a woman was found in Honiton, Devon. This post used a different photo of another hospitalised woman. But again, this is an old photo. The image used actually shows a woman who was a patient at Los Angeles General Medical Center in June 2024, whose identity the hospital was appealing for information on. Devon and Cornwall Police told Full Fact that they have no record of any such a stabbing happening in Honiton.
Another sign that these are not genuine posts is that their comment sections have been turned off, which Derbyshire Police Online Safety team has previously said is a sign of a hoax.
Both posts also include a second photo that appears to show a car being pulled from a body of water while emergency service workers look on. This photo comes from reports of a recent incident in West Palm Beach in Florida, US, when the body of a missing woman, Denise Cosme, was found in her car after it was located in a canal.
We’ve written before about similar posts falsely raising the alarm for missing children, elderly people, abandoned infants and injured dogs in Facebook community groups.
Our investigation into these types of hoax posts found they’re often edited later to include links to surveys, freebies or cheap housing—you can find out more by watching an episode of BBC’s Rip Off Britain in which our investigation is featured. Our guide also offers some tips on how to identify such hoaxes.
This behaviour poses a risk to user engagement with local community groups, which can become overwhelmed with false information. We’ve written to Facebook’s parent company Meta expressing concerns about how these hoax posts can flood community groups, and asking the company to take stronger action in response to this problem.
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