"Watch out everybody, a white van was spotted in such and such street" and other such pointless panic-mongery

[ImNotACat]

AIBU to be totally fucking sick of the "warnings" on local social media about absolutely bloody nothing?

Yeah, you saw a white van. OMFG the driver got out and left something on a doorstep then took a photo Perhaps he's a delivery driver you thick drama llama.

And what? An Asian woman with glasses was taking photos of an empty house on your street?? Quick, log it with the police. She must be up to something. Or maybe, just maybe, she's a fucking estate agent?

A car drove slowly past as you walked your dog? Yes, BECAUSE ITS POURING and the driver was probs trying to avoid soaking you as they went through puddles.

A van was seen driving very slowly round Labyrinth Close with 2 men in the front peering at the front doors 😱 That would be because the numbers are arranged in some bizarre configuration that makes no sense and it's basically impossible to find your way around if you haven't been before. Every time I have to drop something off to that estate (I do local deliveries for work sometimes) I expect to see a post about a badly dressed woman driving a rustbucket and staring into people's gardens 🤣

I mean I know IABU to care about Facebook really but it's infuriating watching people getting so worked up about fuck all.

I am seeing lots of this because people are literally pinching dogs where I live, so the residents off my area are like informers lol!

If anything is going on they will know before the police!!

I just joined Nextdoor because of this thread, and now I know that someone 5 miles from me found a dead bird on a walk. This is the breaking news I'd hoped for.

@RightOnTheEdge

My local Facebook page is full of these. Foreign men hanging around, white vans driving about. Suspicious people walking about probably trying to look for dogs to steal. There seemed to be a particular obsession with a fish van driving about that went on for a few weeks. So many conspiracy theories about it! It drives me crazy. It's good for communities to keep an eye out for each other but there never seems to be any proof or police reports and its always a friend or someone's relative that it happened to 🙄

We must live in the same place especially the dogs and the fish van !!

Some recent nonsense:

Anyone having issues with Sky (or whatever service provider) broadband going down in the last 20 minutes!

If you were walking in the park and a cyclist came up behind you and rang their bell would you interpret this as an aggressive gesture or a friendly acknowledgement?

Anyone heard of anything happening this evening where someone is hurt?

And a cat break in whereby a large aggressive cat smashed its way through someone's cat flap to beat up the resident cat!

At least there have been no fireworks or found cats who weren't actually lost!!!

@ballroompink

Ahahaha this is EVERY local Facebook group isn't it? Ours is always full of posts about helicopters. 'Anyone know what it's doing?' Why do you even care? Also, I live reasonably near an air base. There was a period where every other post was 'Anyone just hear those jets? What's going on?' as if some war had started and nobody knew about it

To be fair, when the helicopter hovers over my house for extended periods of time I want to know why. But I can't imagine that anyone on FB would be able to tell me.

The posts I hate are the "suspicious-looking man/woman" which are invariably a brown-skinned person doing something completely normal like parking or knocking on a door. The scale of racism is breathtaking.

I didn't realise we must all be on the same Facebook community group!

It's bloody ridiculous.

One person stated that she thought a man was going to steal her dog as he was talking in a foreign language on the phone and she "just had a feeling".

I mean WTF?!?

This was followed by lots of "report it", it's not safe to go out, I'm taking pepper spray, we need to walk as a community to be safe.

BATSHIT CRAZY!!

The posts I hate are the "suspicious-looking man/woman" which are invariably a brown-skinned person doing something completely normal like parking or knocking on a door. The scale of racism is breathtaking.

This 💯 %

Don’t even get me started!

We have a group where the local delivery driver always gets harassed:
'Does anybody know how to contact our local Hermes driver? I still haven't had my curtain rod delivered'
'Try Dean'
'Yes, Dean does that round, here's his number 07.....'
Yes, Dean wants a call after he's finished work and having his tea.

Or the photo of a rogue letter addressed to the previous owner
'Does anybody know where Mrs Campbell lives, we've got a letter for her'
She didn't leave a forwarding address for a reason and now we all know your address and that she lived there.

I used to be on NextDoor. I deleted my account because my local group was overrun by a troll with multiple IDs, but yeah it used to be like this.

There was one man who would go into a state of panic and rage every time a helicopter was flying over. It's London. It happens.....but he's like "OMG what's happening? This area is so scary, crime rates up, house prices down 25% blah blah blah". In reality, it's as safe as anywhere in London can be, and property prices are fine. Plus he was a renter, I don't know why he was so obsessed with the price of property when he didn't want to buy! Everything said to him he'd believe, if someone said "there's a bear dancing down the high street" he'd believe it.

Oooh I missed my opportunity. I once encountered a strange* Eastern European man asking where the passport office was. I should have put it on Facebook immediately!
*as in a stranger, which he clearly was as the passport office was in front of him.

This actually all got way out of hand in my local area. There were a couple of weeks where there were repeated posts about ‘watch out, there is a car thief trying car door handles’. Anyway, one night two men coming home from the pub caught the alleged car thief, knocked him to the ground and restrained him. He ended up dying in intensive care from his injuries, the two neighbours were charged with GBH. No idea if the guy actually was doing anything wrong or just caught on the wrong end of the social media frenzy, either way he didn’t deserve to die!

A friend of mine shared a post on the town page the other day saying her daughter had been the victim of an attempted abduction because a bloke drove past her twice in a car. Maybe he was lost!

Last year there was a series of posts about an "Asian kidnapping gang" targeting young girls in the area. Various teenagers claimed to have been followed by them in white van. In the end the local police announced that they'd investigated it and found the claims to be false.

This happens where I live too, there are always lots of people urging each other to 'log' sightings of people driving slowly or overly chatty dog walkers to the police.
As if there are actual police staff hovering over a log book, waiting eagerly for your call.

'Gov, Trish has been on from Labyrinth Close- that white transit's backed up on the drive at number 43 again- get all units down, now!' And the helicopter!'

Ex DH got caught up in one of these. Plumber, driving around trying to find somewhere to park. Got out of his van and walked up the road to the house he was going to to ask them to register his reg number with the permit people.

Facebook story: my teenage daughter was walking home from school and was followed by a man in an unmarked van. He then got out and followed her up the road but when she got to our house he pretended to knock on a door. Have phoned the police

He nearly had a lynch mob after him. He said he hadn’t even noticed the girl

I used to help as admin on a very small local page. Some guy wanted to post a ‘brand new white van driving around the estate, not sure what they’re doing’ warning. By the time I saw it it was several hours later so I deleted it. He then submitted another post demanding to know why it hadn’t been published and wasn’t the page interested in crime prevention? At the advice of the page’s main admin, I deleted that too. He then went through the page to find my name and sent me a further email to my personal FB, thereby confirming that he had far too much time on his hands. Also interesting that he chose to message me and not the main (male) admin, I thought.

@ImNotACat

It's always a "foreign" or "Eastern European" man, sometimes "one of our travelling friends". Like you can tell through a windscreen

Round here they’re always “heard speaking with an Irish accent” ie gypsies buy no one wants to say the actual word.

Not RTFT but wonder if you live near me OP as we get warnings about vans all the time in my local Facebook group. Mind you, we seem to get low flying helicopters over our town with depressing regularity so maybe the police really don't have anything better to do!

We also get people asking who the local Hermes/DPD drivers etc are on a regular basis.

The other one is that people find things when they are out and about, and instead of saying "teddy bear found at Acacia Ave left on garden wall outside number 4" they take it home with them and say contact me with proof you've lost it! I mean what the actual?

And of course if there is any trouble it's always those nasty teens who've been so badly "parented" - adults never do anything wrong! And teens always do exactly what their parents tell them to do so if they're having a sly fag in the playpark it's all their parents' fault.

foreign looking driver of white van

so pathetic

Our local police force have complained more than once on fb about people who report crimes or suspicious activity on local fb pages without bothering to tell the police. One time someone Facebooked about a vehicle crime and the police said "We were actually patrolling that area at the time and could have followed up if anyone had bothered to report it to us instead of just facebooking about it"

I had one about me once on our local group, "a woman was seen being sick behind a bush on the side of the road, must be a drug addict or alcoholic" followed by several comments suggesting those types of people shouldn't be allowed on the streets and oh god what if a child saw me, I should be ashamed.

I was actually pregnant at the time and morning sickness hit me from nowhere as I was walking to a midwife appointment, I tried to be as discreet as possible by hiding behind some shrubbery, obviously that didn't work out.

Our local police actually put out a press release to say that people needed to stop scaremongering and acting go through officalchanels; in the last year they had only had two reports of dog thief and no actual cases of dog theft.

Cue a barrage of “it definitely happened to my friend” despite no one bothering to tell the actual police so they could allocate resources to this massive problem.

And no one listened to the dog owner who said that one of the nice things about owning a dog was that people always came and chatted to you.

Seriously though. Does anyone know anyone who has actually had their dog stolen.

@AnneWeber cross post! I wonder if it’s the same police force. Although I getbthe impression this is a national thing.

We had a drama llama near us who whipped every dog owner in a 3 mile vicinity into an absolute frenzy about a van with two men in it that she had heard/seen at 3.30am......
She convinced everyone they were dog nappers..................
It was the Milk Or More Man and his trainee...
She didn't take too kindly to being out straight!