A viral post on social media alleging to be searching for a missing person known as Lilly Greenlaw has blown up and made its way to multiple groups on Facebook, sparking a search that may or may not be real.
The post alleges that Lilly Greenlaw has gone missing and it shows her in two photos, one in a jean shorts and tank top with a friend and another on her own.
The message to 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 and a tank top,”
While the post is quite urgent and has generated intense buzz all over social media garnering thousands of shares, commenters have tagged it as a scam, alleging it is a sophisticated way for scammers to garner a lot of attention for whatever product they are selling in a roundabout way.
So, follow along as we take a look at this trending story that seems to have no details on the internet apart from numerous shares into massive Facebook groups.
Lilly Greenlaw missing person – scam or not?
This website saw numerous Lilly Greenlaw posts shared into massive groups all over Facebook, all with the same message and all with the same two photos.
However, on our search to find out more information about this missing girl, including the claim that the matter had been reported to the police, we could find nothing on the web (seriously, the entire internet has nothing about a missing Lilly Greenlaw apart from what is present on Facebook).
This raised some suspicions over the authenticity of the claim, coupled with the fact that there appeared to be no details about where she had gone missing from.
The only location detail in the posts where in the first paragraph where the location of the missing girl was changed each time to fit whatever local community page the story was being shared in.
Now, we could not make head or tail of what was happening but then some good Samaritans commented with some revealing info 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 made to generate lots of shares with a convincing story (missing person, kidnapping), etc, and often comments are disabled.
Once they garner thousands or millions of shares the originators can change the content to anything they like and then gain a ton of free publicity for their product, page or whatever they change the content to.
A Facebook page Its a scam explained 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 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.