Received this from a Spanish friend. Know no more than this. Alert the kidnapping of the girl of 3 ½ years, Elise, in Tamaimo, South Tenerife. His kidnappers, two men and a woman, traveling in a Seat Panda TF-7633-V (beige or brown).

* hope attachment works.....

It would appear to be a hoax

http://blog.ryouguchi.com/2010/02/la...redulidad.html

Oh no. Sorry everyone; I received it within minutes of needing to leave a meeting to get 9yo from school, posted without a second thought.
Does make you wonder, how do we know the hoax-catcher site isn't a hoax... not doubting you rachel just pondering.

What makes people post things like this (the hoax that is)

Obvious mistake in first sentence. I am sorry to say due to the amount of hoax missing people, dead people I have heard of over my years on the net I take it all with a pinch of salt, usually a lorry load full.

The chap who sent it to me is Spanish and a teacher..... obviously a sly mistake or he was in a rush to post too. either way it creates a 'little boy who cried wolf' feeling about stuff like this. Who to believe?
Sorry again.

I am sure it was sent on in all innocence because people so rarely check, and these things propagate at lightning speed online. It takes a few more clicks to check things out first but so worth doing! Before sharing anything like this I will always check one or more of the following:
hoax-slayer.com
snopes.com
thatsnonsense.com (esp for facebook)

It truly takes less than a minute... or even just paste the first couple sentences into google and see if you hit one of these hoax-busting sites first off

One of those split second decisions in my case, was literally about to leave the office, thought I'd better post 'just in case' mine was the re-posting that led to her being saved......... naive, stupid, careless, should have known better. Next time I'll try to remember!
Mind you, as I asked before, how do we know it's not a double bluff saying it's a hoax? (I'm not saying that for this one, you understand, just as a principle?!)

I wouldnt beat yourself up over sharing it, the motives were good, that's how these things spread so fast. A lot of the time it's harmless, though you wonder about the picture that is obviously of a real little girl, who it is and how it got used.

There are some awful photos of very sick babies circulating on Facebook just now, people sharing them saying Facebook will pay for their medical treatment if there are enough shares, and I can't believe people don't stop and think about how nonsensical this is, OR that these are real pictures of sick kids (according to thatsnonsense.com one has since died and the parents are very distressed about this sick hoax)

I do agree that it's hard to be certain of facts online... if you have any doubt its worth checking with a number of authoritative sources, but we all have to make our decisions with the info we have access to in the moment I guess. Ideally one would check with the police in Tenerife about this one, but my Spanish wouldnt be up to that I'm sure! When it comes to missing kids the first few hours are critical and its not surprising that a lot of people share before checking...

Tineye the photo and find pages stating the child is three back in 2009 and the car was a Renault MODUS.

I only checked because I thought it was strange I hadn't heard the story in the news. I was googling for news stories, not for hoax de-bunkers.