No, People Aren’t Throwing Money in Italy Amid Coronavirus Scare

One of the images dates back to March 2019 and is from Merida in Venezuela.

A set of images are viral on social media with the false claim that relatives of people who died in Italy due to COVID-19 are throwing money on the streets.

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

Italy has witnessed over a lakh confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus with over 12,000 deaths and over 15,000 recoveries, as per the Johns Hopkins data.

CLAIM

Now, a set of pictures are viral on social with the claim that relatives of people, who have passed away due to the novel coronavirus in Italy, are throwing money on the streets.

The pictures show currency notes lying scattered on the streets.

(Photo Courtesy: Facebook/ Screengrab)

The images are being widely shared on Facebook with the same claim.

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TRUE OR FALSE?

The claim along with the images is false. The images are old and are not related to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic in any way.

IMAGE 1

(Photo Courtesy: Facebook/ Screengrab)

We conducted a Google reverse image search which led us to a tweet posted in March 2019 in which the same image can be seen. The tweet mentions that a bank was looted in Merida in Venezuela and people left the money on the street.

Consequently, we did a keyword search in Spanish “Saqueador bancaria merida” (Translated: Merida bank looted) and found an article published by Venezuela’s media outlet Maduradas.com.

The article when translated using Google translate mentioned that images date back to 11 March 2019 when some people looted a bank in Merida and had scattered old currency on the street and had put some of it on fire.

IMAGE 2

(Photo Courtesy: Facebook/ Screengrab)

We did a Google reverse image search and found that the same image was shared in April 2019 by Professor Steve Hanke, Applied Economist at Johns Hopkins. As per the tweet, this image, too, is from Venezuela.

While we have been able to confirm that the image is old and not related to the coronavirus pandemic, The Quint has not been able to independently verify the image.

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