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The post has appeared in several states – and recently in one of New Jersey’s most affluent towns – showing what, in reality, is a severely injured girl in a hospital bed following a car crash in 2016 in Utah.
Taylor Carlton, who was 16 at the time, eventually emerged from a coma and has long since recovered. She became a mom in 2018, according to her sister.
However, a repost carrying that very same photo of Carlton claims that she's unidentified and was found by the side of the road in Saddle River just this past weekend.
The generators of the post are getting what they wanted – lots and lots of shares.
“We urgently need assistance in identifying a young woman who was robbed, stabbed, and left for dead by the side of the road in [different towns used],” the share-seeking post says.
“She is currently in a coma, and the deputies are unable to identify her because she is missing her ID,” it says.
Here's where it does its insidious work: “Let’s bump this post so it may reach people who can be able to identify her,” it says.
The poster also disabled comments – a dead giveaway that its hosts don’t want anyone in that particular group warning fellow members.
We’ve seen such panic-inducing posts before. This particular number keeps rebounding every year or so. It’s even made its way to South Africa, where re-posters claimed it happened in Pretoria.
What’s the end game?
The first thing you need to know is that it's an online version of a bait and switch.
Those responsible hook users with an alarming claim that tugs at their emotions – a child has gone missing, an elderly dementia patient has been found or an animal has been injured, among other ruses.
Once the audience has grown large enough, someone swaps out the content that’s there. In its place is any number of come-ons, including for real estate.
Some of the replacement content can even get people to share financial information, among other personal data.
There are a variety of ways to check the veracity of one of these posts before you start sharing and become part of the problem.
Perhaps the easiest is to take a chunk of a sentence from the post and run it through a Google search.
A host of responses turn up instantly in Google, for instance, if you copy and paste this block of text: “We urgently need assistance in identifying a young woman who was robbed, stabbed, and left for dead by the side of the road."
Be sure not to include the town.
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