Canfield family warns about daughter's photo used for Facebook h - 21 News Now, More Local News for Youngstown, Ohio -

CANFIELD, Ohio – A Canfield family's firsthand experience after finding themselves a victim of a Facebook hoax presents a warning to everyone who uses Facebook or other social media.

"So I went on the website and I was very shocked to see they were using my daughter's picture saying she was a little girl suffering from cancer and if you shared the page Facebook will donate a $1.20," Diane Stahl said.

But the information doesn't say to whom Facebook will donate money to and the family believes this is an attempt by the person posting the information to get someone to either donate money or give out a credit card number or other form of financial information.

Diane says the photo was taken when her daughter was 5-years-old and in the hospital with pneumonia. Her husband Mark, a photographer, sold the photo to a stock photography collection but maintains the copyright.

"Northjersey.com used it in a news story about when you should take your child to the hospital. Different health sites used it for editorial purposes and used as a photo to illustrate things," Mark said.

Diane was concerned since this lie has been shared with almost 100,000 people. She posted a comment on Facebook that the statements were not true and that the photo is of her healthy daughter who is now 13-years-old.

"People continue to believe it. There were people saying my daughter knows this person and this person does have cancer so it tends to perpetuate itself," Diane said.

Their daughter said she has never had cancer and warns people reading Facebook and other websites not to believe everything you see. 

"I didn't expect this to ever happen to me," Dagmar Stahl said. "Like when I saw stuff like this on Facebook, I used to believe it. Now I know it's not true because it happened to me."

Mark says there are sites where people can check out hoaxes like snopes.com which debunks the hoax around his daughter's photo. The couple warns people to be cognizant of what they're looking at on Facebook before they share it.

"You can take a picture of anything and put [it] on Facebook and say it's something it's not," Mark said.