A video (here, here, and here) of a man searching for treasure in the dried sands of the Ganga River is being shared on social media. In the video, we can see a man using a metal detector to find gold and silver jewellery buried under the sand. We will verify the authenticity of this video through this article.
Claim: Video of a man looking for gold and silver from the dried sands of the Ganga River.
Fact: Although there are news reports about people looking for treasure in River Ganga after it dries up, the viral video does not depict a real incident. This is a scripted video made by a Facebook page named ‘Social Message.’ Hence, the claim made in the post is Misleading.
To check the veracity of the viral claim, we performed a reverse image search on a few keyframes from the video. This search led us to the original version of this video. This was uploaded on Facebook by a page called ‘Social Message’ on 11 November 2024. The caption in Hindi translates to ‘See how gold and silver are extracted when the Ganga dries up.’
In the ‘Intro’ section of ‘Social Message,’ they have mentioned that all the videos posted on their page are scripted and made for educational and informative purposes. There are many such videos (here, here, and here) of people searching for treasure in the Ganga River on their page. This makes it clear that the video does not show a real treasure hunt in the Ganga River.
Additionally, we performed a keyword search using relevant keywords to see if such incidents were reported. We found news reports (here, here, and here) on various such incidents where people searched for coins from Ganga.
To sum up, a scripted video of a man searching for gold and silver in the dried Ganga is being circulated as real.
