A rumor that circulated online in November 2025 claimed a 91-year-old woman was arrested after stealing her husband’s now-unaffordable heart medication. According to the story, the woman had become desperate after her husband’s medication jumped from a price of $50 to $940. Snopes readers emailed us to ask whether the rumor was true.
For example, a Nov. 11 Instagram post (archived) displayed an image of a woman in handcuffs standing in front of a judge. The story began: “She’s 91 years old, standing in a hospital gown, hands in chains. Arrested for felony theft. The judge could hardly believe it.”
Other users on Instagram and Facebook also shared the same claim, sometimes with slightly different images. However, Snopes found no evidence to support the story. Searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo found no news media outlets reporting on the story — only social media posts.
Rather, whoever authored the story appears to have fabricated the entire tale. They aimed to earn advertising revenue from the aforementioned Facebook posts and from WordPress blogs linked on the social media posts. The story about the 91-year-old woman amounted to fiction.
The story of the woman as presented by the posts lacked key details that should have been public knowledge and, if the story were real, would have been included. The woman and her husband were called only “Helen” and “George,” no last name given, for instance. In addition, although the image included alongside the post contained an American flag, the story never specified a city or state. Because the woman reportedly appeared in court, there should have been publicly accessible court documents about her case, but none existed.
Examining the image of the woman found alongside the post revealed several signs it was generated by artificial intelligence tools, including garbled text, an airbrushed appearance and a yellow tint. Running the image through the Sightengine AI-detection website found a 99% probability that someone “likely” generated the image with AI.
The post may have been shared widely online because of an October 2025 change that greatly affected the price of health insurance provided by the U.S. government. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress passed a series of relief measures that, among many other things, lowered health insurance premiums for millions of Americans. That relief measure expired in October 2025, and Democrats cited it as a main reason for shutting down the federal government.Â
For further reading, Snopes has previously reported on other AI-generated rumors, including that Sen. John Kennedy had won an argument with Democrats on C-SPAN and that former President Barack Obama said in a video that Donald Trump was dying.
