Claims that a girl called Ellie Morrad has gone missing in the UK have been spreading rapidly on Facebook this week.

But these reports are fake. One post says she went missing in St Neots, Cambridgeshire. But another says she went missing in Porthmadog in north west Wales. 

The photo accompanying both posts is not of Ellie Morrad but of a girl from Ohio, in the United States, who went missing and was found late last year. This girl is not named Ellie Morrad.

This is the latest in a series of fake missing children reports on Facebook, which are designed to scam people. 

Previous posts have been used to collect personal details from victims in schemes known as “phishing scams”. 

These latest posts link to web pages which have been flagged by Google as “deceptive”. On clicking through, the pages display 404 error messages.

Last weekend, the Mail on Sunday, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People all reported that Londoners were the “most likely” people in the country to search for teeth whitening treatments. 

But each publication made a crucial error in its reporting.

The figures used do not adjust for population. And so it’s unsurprising that London—by far the most populous city in the country—would account for the highest number of search enquiries about teeth whitening.

But that does not mean that Londoners are more likely to enquire about teeth whitening than people elsewhere in the country.

The Sunday Mirror and Sunday People shared their data with Full Fact.

The findings—which came from a US dental company called Express Dentist—were indeed based on raw “average monthly search results”, rather than a measure which controlled for population size.

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