Facebook Ruins Woman’s Attempt to Pin Crime on Her Sister

Last week , a sheriff ’s office in South Carolina posted a pretty crazystoryto its Facebook Thomas Nelson Page about how Facebook ’s “ People You May Know ” feature had foiled a woman ’s attempt to obliterate her identity from the police force .

The story , which was shared thousands of time and have somepick - upin the localmedia , went like this : A woman driving a livid SUV got draw over for give a traffic violation . She told the officer she did n’t have her gadget driver ’s licence , and alternatively yield them her name and her date of birth . The officers ran the name through their system , did n’t find any flags , so they just sent her off with a ticket for not receive her machine driver ’s license .

But then the supposed crazy matter happened : According to the Berkeley County Sheriff ’s Office , one of the officeholder “ was on Facebook when a visibility matching the name given to Deputies on the traffic point popped up on her citizenry she may have it away . The kicker ? The name was for a different mortal . ”

https://www.facebook.com/BerkCoSheriff/photos/a.780512195358616/2221890687887419/

The woman that the officer had pulled over was Amanda Leigh Wall , 31 , consort to police , but she had given officer her baby ’s name and engagement of birth . When the policeman draw Wall ’s factual name through their system , they discovered why she ’d repair to inherited identity theft : Wall ’s driver ’s licence was set aside .

The sheriff ’s office relay this story via its Facebook page along with Wall ’s photo , the hashtags # GirlStopLying and # YouThoughtYouFooledUs , and a call for Wall to sour herself in .

Argentina’s President Javier Milei (left) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., holding a chainsaw in a photo posted to Kennedy’s X account on May 27. 2025.

A kind soul flagged this story for me onTwitter , because I’vereportedon how Facebook is able to make inexplicable ( and sometimes creepy-crawly ) connection between ostensible strangers with its “ People You May love ” friend recommendation service . This incident seemed peculiarly inexplicable . It sounded almost unbelievable … and that ’s because it is not , in fact , on the dot what pass .

I got in touching with the police section whose officer had allegedly spotted Wall ’s sister as a ‘ someone you may know . ’ ( bewilderingly , this was a different means than the one that post the tarradiddle to Facebook . officer from two agency had tatter - team up on this dealings stop . ) A spokesperson from the Goose Creek County Police Department tell me that the report , as relayed by the Berkeley Sheriff ’s Office , is “ not what happen at all . ”

The Goose County officer involved in the stop had a feeling that Wall was n’t giving the right identity . So she later looked up the name Wall gave on Facebook , as one does , and discovered a person with a visibility photo that did n’t await like the individual who had been driving the white SUV . Let ’s call this person Aggrieved Sister . The officer had a common friend with Aggrieved Sister and got Aggrieved Sister ’s identification number from that somebody , predict her and asked whether she ’d recently been pull in over , and if she had n’t , who might have given officers her name and date of parturition .

William Duplessie

Aggrieved Sister decided not to take the declination and pass over Wall ’s real name . Thanksgiving is operate to be really awkward for this clan this year .

“ The officer did good fact-finding employment and happen out who the mortal really was , ” say the spokesperson by phone .

So a magical and deep algorithm did not solve this typesetter’s case ; it was just an officer doing some Facebook - stalking and tapping into the power of the bunch - sourced surveillance machine Mark Zuckerberg birthed onto the world .

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