POSTS ONLINE ASKING for people’s help to find a 77-year-old man who went missing in Celbridge, Co Kildare, are a hoax. The posts actually show the name and photo of a man who died in Ohio, America, earlier this year.

“FLOOD YOUR FEEDS ~ MISSING!” a post in the Facebook group Celbridge locals Notice Board begins.

“Our Dad, John T Sigman aged 77 drove out last night with his dog Cami and he still hasn’t returned.

“He was last seen in Celbridge doesn’t know where he’s going, he has chronic memory loss. There is a silver alert activated on him.

(A Silver Alert is a US notification system used when elderly people go missing. The term is not generally used in Ireland).

“Please help bump this post so we can get him home safely,” the post ends.

That appeal has been shared more than 130 times since it was posted on 12 December.

However, while the name and photo used in the post are real, they do not belong to a man who went missing in Celbridge this week. The real John T Sigman was found dead in Ohio, in America, last June, following a weeks-long search.

The missing person post was made by a Facebook account that uses a stock image for its profile picture. None of the posts on its page, which are largely about property to rent, give any indication of a real person’s identity.

“It’s a click bait scam,” a review left on the page reads. “The post will change to a cash app offering cash incentives.

“People are then fooled into believing it’s true because you commented on it. People believing you actually received something when they are getting conned.”

The Garda National Cyber Crime Bureau (GNCCB) has called previous similar campaigns “phishing scams”.

Such scams often work by luring people in by tugging at their heartstrings first.

The posts are then changed, often to include links to sites where their information is stolen, often their passwords or bank details.

The user that posted the missing person post to the Celbridge Facebook group also has messages for financial aid and property, which include links out of Facebook.

It is possible that these posts had more engaging content initially, but were edited after they had been shared.

Using tools provided by Meta, The Journal was able to identify dozens of other missing persons posts for “John T Sigman” that were posted after the real person’s body had been found.

One such scam, posted into a swap group for a rural area of Alabama was viewed more than 495,200 times. Another post, put into a group for events in Dundalk, Co Louth, was shared 2,600 times and viewed 260,100 times

These posts featuring Sigman have, cumulatively, been viewed millions of times and been shared tens of thousands of times.

Most of these posts use the same wording, except for the location being changed to match the group it was posted in. 

The Journal has previously debunked similar scams that used real photos of people who had been found dead to spread their posts.

Other similar scams used real pictures of injured children, including one who had been mauled by a dog, to say that they had been found wandering the streets of Irish towns.

Others still used stolen images of animals to say that pets had been lost and found.