Claim:
Trail camera footage authentically showed Jacob Riley, a missing 3-year-old boy from Georgia, walking with a pack of wolves.
Rating:
In mid-November 2025, a video circulating on social media claimed to show trail camera footage of Jacob Riley, a missing 3-year-old boy from Georgia, walking with a pack of wolves.
Riley allegedly went missing from his family’s home on Thursday, Nov. 13, according to posts sharing the video. The posts also claimed that authorities in Cherry Log, Georgia, located outside Blue Ridge, said the trail camera footage was captured early Friday on a private property line.
According to the posts, search teams had expanded their efforts in the area, deploying drones and K-9 units, but officials had not confirmed Riley’s condition.
Multiple Snopes readers emailed us and searched our website to verify the story.
However, there was no evidence supporting the claims. Searches of Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yahoo found no credible news reports about a missing child by this name. If the story and video were real, multiple reputable news outlets likely would have reported on it. Instead, the search results led to other fact checks debunking the video.
Additionally, searches of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and National Center for Missing and Exploited Children websites returned no results for a missing person named Jacob Riley.
The footage was first shared on Instagram and Facebook (archived here and here) by Blue Ridge Breaking News, a social media account that posts satirical content.
The Instagram account described it as “world-renowned satirical news,” while the Facebook page’s bio read: “We are a world-renowned satirical news organization bringing you the stories that matter — or at least sound like they do.”
The video in question was likely generated using artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Snopes identified several signs that pointed to AI creation, including a lack of footprints and minimal to no blinking. Delayed or inconsistent blinking is common in AI-generated videos.
AI-generated trail camera and surveillance video content is frequently shared on social media, likely because imperfections are less noticeable in grainy, black-and-white footage. For example, Snopes recently debunked trail camera photos that claimed to show a wolf protecting piglets from a mountain lion in Montana.
Blue Ridge Breaking News has previously shared similar “trail camera” videos, including one on YouTube (archived) that claimed to show a chihuahua leading a wolf pack. That video included YouTube’s “altered or synthetic content” disclosure that stated: “Sound or visuals were significantly edited or digitally generated.”
For background, here is why we alert readers to rumors created by sources that call their output humorous or satirical.
