Getty Images.
It is a picture custom-tailored to break your heart: a Great Dane draped across a blanket in front of a cinderblock wall in what appears to be an animal hospital, her head supported by two hands, her left front paw hooked up to a IV line.
The photo is accompanied by a message: "UPDATE, it's now the 7th day" — a broken-heart emoji is inserted — "and am urgently looking for the owners of this beautiful Great Dane we picked up on the side road in Lake Luzerne. She's really depressed, not eating. Please help me bump this post so I can find the owner."
What sort of heartless fiend would hoard the half-calorie of energy required to click the SHARE button if there was even a slight chance doing so would help reunite this pathetic creature with her owner — in Lake Luzerne, or iin any of the other far-flung North American locations named in the dozens of otherwise identical Facebook posts that use the exact same photo?
Advertisement
Article continues below this ad
Such as Oklahoma City, Brooklyn, Ontario and Ohio — places where it is perpetually "now the 7th day," though the original posters — people with oddly threadbare Facebook account and profile photos that appear to come straight out of an image bank — have for some reason switched off the comment function on their post, which is kind of a weird choice for someone desperately seeking out dog-owner tips from the general public.
Here's how the scam works: These posts appear and are shared out by swap-meet websites with names like "Grover's Corners Community Events" or "Grover's Corners Digital Garage Sale." Those Facebook pages become the beneficiaries of the recirculation work of kind-hearted dog lovers in the various communities where the posts appear. The swap-meet sites — usually of questionable online parentage themselves — appear to be the true creators of the lost-dog posts: After enough people have recirculated the original post, the image often changes from the luckless Great Dane to an ad for a local restaurant or a deal on a used SUV with low, low mileage.
On the scale of human evil, this form of online con is definitely a galaxy away from Charles Manson and several hundred feet south of Bernie Madoff. But in the way it seeks to leverage human kindness in exchange for nothing more than a boosted garage-sale post, the ruse is enough to make me long for the return of the form of punishment known as the pillory, where the public could throw rotten cabbage at wrongdoers in the town square.
I became aware of the lost-dog scam after my mother and her cousin — two of the most savvy Canadian-born dog-lovers I know — fell for versions of the ruse within a few weeks of each other. This sent me down a series of rabbit holes leading to equally luckless sad-eyed Saint Bernards and other domestic animals in similar fake 7th-day distress. I quickly learned that I could wear my fingers down to nubs typing "SCAM" below each of these. As Don Quixote surely would have advised me, there are always more windmills than any one human can fight.
Advertisement
Article continues below this ad
If I could explain this weeks-long mini-obsession, it probably has something to do with my professional involvement in the war on misinformation and my overlapping disdain for the way that social media networks seem unable or at least unwilling to sniff out bad actors. Have I been taken in by online hustles? You bet: I am still awaiting the nice sweater I purchased from what turned out to be a false-front retailer, also accessed via Facebook and now disappeared from the platform like a runaway Great Dane in the night.
In that instance, my vaunted ability to be skeptical about sources failed me. (In my defense, it was a very nice sweater.) The same happens to those taken in by the lost-dog scheme — a con job that is similar in strategy to the flood of other forms of disinformation involving conspiracy theories from the medical to the political, or both at the same time. I receive several emails each week from people making a claim that is the equivalent of someone insisting that even though the Great Dane photo has, yes, been used across the nation, they're convinced that this time the dog was actually picked up in Lake Luzerne.
The yawning gap in online literacy — the ability to discern between a reputable claim and garbage content — is a problem for every age group. (It's almost certainly a contributing factor to the appalling findings of a recent poll reporting that roughly a fifth of Americans ages 18-29 agreed with the notion that Holocaust was a myth.) Despite the good work of a range of media trade organizations and nonprofits, the war on misinformation is being lost, one click at a time.
I wish I had a better solution beyond the Latin maxim of caveat lector: Let the reader beware.
Advertisement
Article continues below this ad
Seiler: The national lost-dog scam
9
0
02.03.2024
Getty Images.
It is a picture custom-tailored to break your heart: a Great Dane draped across a blanket in front of a cinderblock wall in what appears to be an animal hospital, her head supported by two hands, her left front paw hooked up to a IV line.
The photo is accompanied by a message: "UPDATE, it's now the 7th day" — a broken-heart emoji is inserted — "and am urgently looking for the owners of this beautiful Great Dane we picked up on the side road in Lake Luzerne. She's really depressed, not eating. Please help me bump this post so I can find the owner."
What sort of heartless fiend would hoard the half-calorie of energy required to click the SHARE button if there was even a slight chance doing so would help reunite this pathetic creature with her owner — in Lake Luzerne, or iin any of the other far-flung North American locations named in the dozens of otherwise identical Facebook posts that use the exact same photo?
Advertisement
Article continues below this ad
Such as Oklahoma City, Brooklyn, Ontario and Ohio — places where it is perpetually "now the 7th day," though the original posters — people with oddly threadbare Facebook account and profile photos that appear to come........
© Times Union
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Nikkei Editorial
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Rami G Khouri
