Stolen photos, stolen identities, false stories – this is how click collectors play with people's feelings.

This photo of a young woman in the hospital is being re-uploaded, re-shared, and re-texted over and over again. Sometimes her name is Jessica, sometimes her mother is said to be of the opinion that she won't be shared anywhere because she has cancer, and sometimes she supposedly asks for birthday wishes or the famous Amen.

It's about this status post, about which we have been receiving repeated inquiries for some time:

image
Image in plain text:

My mother said no one would share me because I had cancer - can I have your amen here? if you're not ashamed of me

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Fact check

Unfortunately, we were unable to find out the young lady's true identity, but one thing is clear: this photo is being used as click bait.

The photo can be traced back to March 14, 2017 and ends with the trail of a Facebook account belonging to a woman named Marie Gelmi. This account no longer exists.

On Twitter you can still find a post from March 15, 2017 in French:

on the website Le Salon de Soli as an entry for a potential fake profile. Our colleagues at Snopes and Hoax Reporting came to similar conclusions.

Click farming

After this time, the photo can be found again and again on Twitter and Facebook. In combination with various, supposedly associated background stories.

There are several versions circulating, such as that it would be Jessica , who suffers from blood cancer and has her birthday today. You should wish her all the best. On Facebook, the image was supplemented with a caption: Share If You Love My Smile .

And here we have reached the crux of the matter. These sites want to profit from the photo. This attracts users and entices them to interact on the site. Be it a “like”, a comment or it is shared. This is how click collectors grow Facebook pages that they will sell in the future.

These click collectors try to emotionally blackmail users with stolen photos of sick people, children or animals. In general, such scams to collect clicks are morally very questionable.

Nobody wants to be cold-hearted and it is precisely this emotionality of people that such site operators target for their purposes. Because if you don't comment, you're a "bad person" and who wants to be?

And they don't care if they use photos that don't belong to them and generate and spread fake news.

A user from the community put this very aptly, he says on the topic:

The operators of such sites (…) should be ashamed of themselves because they use cheap tricks like this to collect clicks and likes, spread fake album wisdom and often violate copyrights in order to suddenly become commercial at some point when the sites are big enough and selling off clothes or trinkets. (…)

Result:

Unfortunately, who the woman in the photo is is unknown.

But the photo is being used as click bait by many Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to manipulate users into interacting with the page.


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Notes:
1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication. The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual contributions were created through the use of machine assistance and were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )