Awareness video showing woman’s abduction believed to be true

by Priyanka Jha

A CCTV video of a group of men kidnapping a woman has been circulating widely on social media. In the clip, the woman can be seen waiting on the side of a road, when a man standing behind her talking on his phone signals a group of men some distance away to start approaching her. Suddenly, the men arrive in a vehicle while the man forces her into the car and they hastily drive away.

Several users shared the footage. Among them was Congress leader Alka Lamba who also quote-tweeted it.

Awareness video

Alt News performed a reverse image search of the video frames, which did not yield anything substantial. However, taking a closer look at the clip, we realised this is a recording of a video posted on Facebook. In the screenshot below, the name of the page that posted the clip can be partially seen.

Alt News tracked down the Facebook page called Sanjjanaa Galrani. Its ‘Intro’ section mentions that the page shares videos and scripted dramas to create awareness. Although we could not locate the video in question, we found many such public service announcement videos. Like the viral clip, these videos also explained the sequence of events to the viewer through captions, and the person of interest was identified with a red circle in the thumbnails.

We compared an old video posted by the page to the footage currently circulating online. As shown below, there were numerous similarities, like the camera name CM2, the date, and the time-stamp. Even the font and style of the captions used to explain the events are identical.

We tried contacting the page and will update this article should we receive a response. Alt News has earlier debunked many such scripted videos which were mistakenly shared as real. Links to a few of these are given below:

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About the Author

She specializes in information verification, examining mis/disinformation, social media monitoring and platform accountability. Her aim is to make the internet a safer place and enable people to become informed social media users. She has been a part of Alt News since 2018.