Woman charged after starting Walmart child abduction hoax

A Wisconsin woman was charged this week after starting a viral hoax on Facebook claiming that someone attempted to abduct her child.

Child abduction hoaxes are certainly nothing new and have circulated via chain email and social media messages for years (one specific version more so than any other). Why they begin in generally a mystery. Trying to serve as a moral tale perhaps. A string of Chinese whispers gone awry maybe. And most of the time we never really know where they began either.

However a recent warning (below) about an attempted abduction outside a Walmart in Wisconsin that later turned out to be a hoax certainly did have a very traceable source.

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After the viral warning began to spread across the local area, resulting in the police receiving several calls from worried residents, authorities quickly tracked the hoax back to a 25 year old Menasha woman who later admitted the entire warning was fabricated. Straight away the posted from the Facebook page telling residents it was just a hoax.

And now she is facing an obstruction charge as a result of her deception, though police have stated the charge was for providing false information to a police officer as opposed to the actual Facebook posting itself.

Why someone would want to create such a hoax is really beyond us. There are plenty of more effective ways of raising awareness to such safety concerns. In fact it could easily be argued that circulating nonsense like this detracts from this very real issue by making it more difficult for relevant authorities to spread genuine information.

Social media can be an effective conduit for these types of warning messages, but for it to work we need to ensure we only spread genuine information and not lies.

Read our 12 reasons why you should research a rumour before clicking share here.