Claim: Bloodied old man was found lost in Malta.
Verdict: The photo was taken in Los Angeles in 2018, showing a 91-year-old man after he suffered a racially motivated attack. The photo is being used by scammers to gain popularity.
A photo of a seemingly lost bloodied and bruised man circulating online is just the latest in a long series of scam posts that have travelled the world and reached Malta’s shores.
The posts show an older man struggling to get off the ground as blood streams down his face.
“Does anyone recognize this old man?” the posts ask. "He showed up at our house".
“Let’s flood our feeds to help find his family”.
And people certainly obliged. One post was shared over 1,300 times by unsuspecting Facebook users on Monday and Tuesday, many imploring their friends to reach out to them with any information.
Photo taken in Los Angeles
But a quick online search quickly reveals that this photo is several years old and taken on the other side of the world.
The man in the picture is Rodolfo Rodriguez, a (then) 91-year-old Mexican man who was the victim of a racist attack when he was assaulted with a brick on a Los Angeles street back in 2018.
Rodriguez had travelled to Los Angeles to visit his family in California when a group of people attacked him with a concrete brick, telling him to “go back to Mexico”.
He survived the attack, emerging with a broken cheekbone and several bruises on his face.
The gang leader, Laquisha Jones, was arrested days later and eventually sentenced to 15 years behind bars.
Sympathy scams
The Facebook posts sharing the Rodriguez’s image in Malta trace a well-worn path in an effort to dupe people.
Last year, a spate of similar posts showing lost children and injured dogs hit Maltese social media, each being shared thousands of times.
And, more recently, scammers took to sharing photos of a three-year-old boy, claiming he was found in Malta.
These photos are often shared by fake Facebook profiles to local property pages, each time asking readers to share the post as widely as possible. Comments beneath the post are often closed to prevent people from pointing out that this is a scam.
The posts are believed to be an example of a sympathy scam in which a page or post tries to receive a large number of likes or follows by pulling at people’s heartstrings.
The scammers will then change the post’s contents to promote a fraudulent scheme, often a fake cryptocurrency investment, banking on the post’s thousands of likes and shares to give it some added legitimacy.
How can you spot a hoax?
Scam Facebook posts such as this often contain several tell-tale signs suggesting that the post may be a hoax.
- The post appears to have been posted by a fake profile. View the profile of the person posting the image to see if they have posted before or if they appear to have connections to other genuine social media accounts.
- Comments have been disabled. This is usually done to prevent people from warning others that the post is a hoax.
- The text in the post has unusual spelling or formatting, suggesting that the text may have been copied from elsewhere or somehow altered.
- The photo does not appear to be genuine or may have been used before. Carrying out a reverse image search often reveals whether the image has been used before.
Verdict
The Facebook posts sharing this picture are just the latest in a long series of scam posts.
The photo shows a 91-year-old Mexican man, Rodolfo Rodriguez, who was attacked in Los Angeles in 2018.
The story was widely reported in the USA and internationally, often using the same photo used by scammers.
The claim is therefore false as the evidence clearly refutes it.
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