A 14-year-old boy’s sudden disappearance from a Boy Scout camp left his family heartbroken and searching for answers.

Despite exhaustive efforts, authorities were stumped for three weeks, eventually declaring the teenager, Eric Langford, dead after coming up empty-handed.

In a shocking turn of events, Eric appeared at a police station 12 years later. He was disheveled, without shoes, and his hair was long and tangled, as captured by security cameras.

He recounted a harrowing tale of abduction, claiming he’d been held captive in a secluded cabin before finally escaping, hoping to reunite with his family.

Yet, this suspenseful story is purely fictional.

Eric Langford was never abducted, never attended a camp in the Adirondack Mountains, and in reality, he never existed at all.

The entire story – including a photo of a tragically lost boy in his scout uniform and the shocking police station footage – was fabricated with AI.

Experts told the Daily Mail that though fake stories like this are not new, AI was making them easier to mass-produce and more believable to unsuspecting viewers, and warned of a scary future of rampant misinformation.

‘There’s a not-too-distant future where the Fake Boy Scout example becomes the norm,’ FGS Global social media consultant Willie Roberson said.

‘People will not know if anything about the person, connection, issue, and/or activity they’re engaging with is real or not, but it’s atop their feeds due to the algorithm. 

‘They’ll also lack the critical media literacy skills and ability to discern if it’s real or not themselves.’

The Eric Langford hoax began with a 28-minute video on YouTube channel ‘Unknown Files’, which presents itself as just another true-crime podcast.

‘We tell you about mysterious disappearances, complicated investigations, and unexpected twists of fate. Dive into these real-life stories full of drama, mystery, and human emotions,’ its description read.

However, all the channels videos have the same format – an artificial-sounding voice telling the story over an AI-generated image of the subject.

Every video is about someone who vanished hiking or in a wilderness area, only to miraculously turn up years later.

The Eric Langford video was then chopped up into six bite-sized clips and posted on TikTok by another user, amassing millions of views between them.

These clips all begin with a slightly different angle of security camera footage supposedly from a police station in Albany, New York, of Eric stumbling in.

Each bit of footage showed an emaciated Eric with long matted hair and beard slowly shuffling in and begging the officer at reception for help.

The footage only lasts about ten seconds, which is the limit for AI-generated videos on many creation platforms, before returning to the Unknown Files background.

The story goes that Eric was at a Boy Scout camp at Black Pond, a remote forested lake trail in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York.

The scout troop with headed by instructor David Harrison set out on their traditional evening hike on July 17, 1989, and planned to set up camp for the night.

Eric volunteered to collect water from a nearby stream, but never returned.

Essex County Sheriff’s deputies searched a 50-mile radius from the camp twice, but found no trace of the teen and he was declared dead three weeks later.

His parents grieved and the world moved on without him – until October 3, 2001, when he stumbled into the police station.

Eric claimed a man named Charles Daniels abducted him and kept him prisoner in the soundproof basement cell of a remote hunting lodge for 12 years.

Daniels apparently convinced the boy the world had been ravaged by war and his parents were dead.

He escaped when Daniels had a stroke, and police tracked down the predator in hospital – but he died four days later without saying anything about the crime.

The video ended with a bleak prediction of Eric’s future as he reenters society as a 26-year-old man forgotten by the world.

‘But for Eric himself, it’s not a story. It’s 12 years of his life that can never be returned. It’s a childhood stolen by a man whose motives remain a mystery,’ the AI voiceover said.

‘It’s a daily struggle with memories that time cannot erase, and it is a reminder that sometimes monsters do not live in fairy tales, but deep in the woods, in old houses where roads do not reach. 

‘And that disappearance is not always the end, but sometimes the beginning of the worst nightmare that can last for years.’

Such a gripping yarn would have been fodder for every tabloid newspaper and TV show in the US, all racing to be the first to interview Eric and track down the cabin he was held in.

After all, as the video’s narration began, ‘What he told investigators revealed one of the most horrific kidnapping stories in American criminal history.’ 

But not a single reference to Eric or the story can be found in newspaper archives, and it is not reported on any reliable website.

Some of the details are also incompatible with reality, such as Eric being declared after three weeks when New York law requires at least three years.

None of this stopped the story being reposted and regurgitated by shady social media pages and websites – some based in Vietnam – that all appeared to use AI.

Though the Eric Langford story went particularly viral on social media with thousands of people reposting it as real, it is just one of incalculable AI fakes flooding the internet.

Hoax debunking site Snopes has dozens of similar AI-generated fake tales it has investigated and found to be false.

‘AI-enhanced falsehoods are on the rise largely because technology has made it easier to create and distribute them while removing many of the friction points that may have slowed down disinformation,’ injury lawyer Joe Zdrilich told the Daily Mail.

‘Stories like this seem plausible because they adhere to established emotional patterns, employ historically appropriate details and are executed with a degree of polish.’

George Washington University professor and former US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency official Anmol Agarwal said though the Eric Langford story was only created to make money from clicks, other had sinister motives.  

‘A lot of the time, these misinformation posts/articles are trying to shape public opinion regarding an issue, so to do that, it tries to target emotions,’ he said.

‘The misinformation campaigns feed off of human emotions like panic, urgency and typically seem very sensational, so that they can be shared and spread rapidly. 

‘AI models are becoming more sophisticated and it is easier for people to generate very realistic looking images, videos, and content quickly and easily, and there are many tools that do this for people that are completely free.’ 

IT consultant Nizel Adams said he dealt with AI fakes on a ‘daily basis’, made believable by using the same structure and wording as real ones.

‘There are hundreds if not thousands of entirely fake news websites that generate dozens of fake articles daily by crawling legitimate news websites and then generating content based that,’ he said.

‘At times, we’ll see an AI-generated rehashing of a viral story that was published years ago by a legitimate news source, but the story behind the pictures is entirely different from the original. 

‘What may have been a feel-good news story is transformed into an entirely different animal with foreign context.’

Qualaix AI expert Marva Bailer said Eric’s story was an example of a ‘new phase of misinformation’ based on emotional storytelling to make it seem real.

‘The structure mirrors human-interest journalism. A missing child. A long timeline. A dramatic resolution. Visual proof layered in,’ she said.

‘Each element increases believability and sharing. This is emotionally engineered storytelling built to feel real, spread quickly, and earn trust.’

Matthew Stern, a cybercrime private investigator at his firm CNC Intelligence, said AI hoaxes were written, structured, and distributed in ways that closely resemble legitimate reporting or personal testimony, 

‘This makes them believable and hard to debunk without in-depth research, something the average reader may not have the resources to do,’ he said.

‘AI-generated narratives now meet many of the surface-level signals we historically relied upon to assess legitimacy.’

StarApple AI founder Adrian Dunkley warned that when people stopped asking whether something was true, manipulation became easy. 

‘Debunking cannot keep pace with industrial-scale deception which is where AI is headed,’ he said.

Experts warned that misinformation was heading towards becoming so rampant that it would catastrophically undermine trust in legitimate news outlets.

Social media comment threads are already full of people accusing any dramatic video of being AI, not matter its legitimacy.

‘When AI-generated content becomes indistinguishable from human-generated content and gets posted on legitimate news sites, consumers don’t know what stories are real and what are not,’ Stern said.

‘This eventually can lead to credibility collapse, and even accurate information functionally becomes unavailable.’

Zdrilich said from his perspective as a lawyer, AI was making fewer people believe the testimonies of real victims and even verified public records 

‘That loss of trust has legal and social implications as well, from the harassment of innocent people to misdirected public outrage,’ he said.

Bailer encouraged readers to be wary of any story that seemed designed to provoke an emotional response.

‘Stories that push urgency, nostalgia, or deep sympathy deserve a pause,’ she said.

‘Checking original sources, verifying images, and confirming coverage by established outlets helps reduce exposure to manipulation.’