A viral social media post claiming to be searching for a missing person named Lilly Greenlaw has spread widely, reaching multiple Facebook groups and sparking a search that may or may not be genuine.
The post claims that Lilly Greenlaw is missing and includes two photos of her: one showing her in jean shorts and a tank top with a friend, and another of her alone.
The message in the post reads: “PARENTS OF TEENS please spread the news and ask your kids if they have seen or heard from my daughter Lilly Greenlaw!!! She is currently missing and I need help! The police are involved. She was wearing jean shorts and a tank top.”
Despite the urgency of the post and the significant attention it has received, with thousands of shares, many commenters have labeled it as a scam. They allege it is a sophisticated ploy by scammers to gain attention for their products in an indirect manner.
Stay with us as we explore this trending story, which appears to have no verifiable details online beyond numerous shares in large Facebook groups.
Lilly Greenlaw missing person – scam or not?
This website observed numerous posts about Lilly Greenlaw being shared in large Facebook groups, all containing the same message and the same two photos.
However, despite our efforts to find more information about this missing girl and verify the claim that it had been reported to the police, we found nothing on the internet (seriously, there is no information about a missing Lilly Greenlaw outside of Facebook).
This raised suspicions about the authenticity of the claim, especially since there were no details about where she had gone missing from.
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The only location details in the posts appeared in the first paragraph, where the missing girl’s location was changed each time to match the local community page where the story was being shared.
We initially couldn’t make sense of what was happening until some good Samaritans commented with revealing information on some of the missing person posts.
According to these comments, the entire thing is a scam.
So, how does this scam work? Apparently, these posts are designed to generate lots of shares with a convincing story (missing person, kidnapping, etc.), often with comments disabled.
Once the posts accumulate thousands or millions of shares, the originators can change the content to anything they want, gaining a lot of free publicity for their product, page, or whatever they switch the content to.
A Facebook page called “It’s a Scam” explained it perfectly:
“This is how it works… They create a post that will get lots of shares (like missing or found animals or elderly people) and turn off comments. After it gets so many shares, they edit the post to something that drives traffic to a bogus website that steals your info,” the page wrote, along with a helpful graphic.
Other users also shared their thoughts on how it could be a scam.
Based on all these, and the utter lack of any other info about Lilly Greenlaw online, it seems the commenters are right.
Generally, we research things that have little info online for our stories but no matter how little info there is, there is always some info you can base a story on.
For Lilly Greenlaw, nothing like that exists! Make of that what you will.
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