Fact check: Scammers using photo of teen from 2016 car crash in copy-and-paste scheme

BrieAnna J. Frank, USA TODAY
·3 min read

The claim: Image shows woman mugged, stabbed in various cities

A Jan. 13 Facebook post (direct link, archive link) features a photo of a young woman lying in a hospital bed with various tubes attached to her body.

“#Lakeland We need urgent help identifying a young woman who was mugged, stabbed and left for dead on the roadside,” reads the post's caption. “She is in a coma right now & the deputies are not able to identify her because she doesn’t have an ID on her. Let’s bump this post so it may reach people who can be able to identify her.”

The post in a Lakeland, Florida, classified group was shared more than 400 times in just over two weeks. Other versions of the claim were shared hundreds of additional times and said the woman was found in locations including Sacramento, California; Canton, Texas; and Merced County, California.

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Our rating: False

Sheriff’s departments in areas where the claim spread told USA TODAY there's no evidence of any such incident. The image included in the posts comes from a years-old news story about a Utah teenager injured in a car accident. The copy-and-paste posts are a tactic used by scammers to identify potential targets.

Image shows girl in coma after a 2016 car crash, not a street attack

The Polk County Sheriff’s Office, whose jurisdiction includes Lakeland, Florida, is not investigating any such case “or anything like it right now,” spokesperson Brian Bruchey said.

The department frequently comes across “fraudulent information” on virtual garage sale and marketplace pages, such as the one the claim was posted on, Bruchey said.

The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office is also not investigating such a case, according to spokesperson Sgt. Amar Gandhi.

Neither is the Merced County Sheriff's Office, which would have asked for the public's assistance on any such case through its official social media pages or local news outlets, said spokesperson Alexandra Britton.

The image featured in the post was included in a May 2016 report from The Spectrum about a 16-year-old girl who was critically injured in a Utah car crash.

The teenager woke up from a medically-induced coma less than a week after the crash, according to KTVX-TV in Salt Lake City. A Facebook support page maintained by her family said she was released from the hospital the following month.

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USA TODAY debunked a similar claim in October 2022, when posts circulated using identical text but a different picture.

The copy-and-paste posts are used by scammers to identify potential future targets, misinformation expert and University of Cincinnati professor Jeffrey Blevins previously told USA TODAY.

“It’s a gullibility check,” Blevins said. “They’re likely to circle back to you later to see what you’re willing to share, or they might try to engage you one-on-one, get you to accept a friend request, that kind of thing.”

USA TODAY reached out to users who shared the claim for comment.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: False claim image shows hospitalized woman after attack