A viral photo of a little boy wearing black Wellington boots and a home-made shirt stopped us in our tracks.
The most striking feature of the photo was the plastic stripy carrier bag he wore over his jumper. It was fashioned into something like a footballer's bib, with the word "Messi" and the number 10 written on the back in marker pen.
The photo was first posted on Twitter by a Messi fan using a now-defunct handle, @illMindOfRobin, on 13 January 2016. But its origins were murky - tweets at the time hinted that the photos had originally come from Facebook.
Soon, a global hunt was on to locate the boy in the photo. The person behind @illMindOfRobin suggested the photo was taken in Dohuk (also spelled Duhok), a Kurdish region of Iraq.
He wrote "Messi in Kurdistan" and "Messi in Duhok, Iraq" but later confessed to BBC Trending that he only spread the rumour to give the place "slight recognition", as his parents grew up there.
But the Iraq story had already taken hold, and it even appeared even more solid when news agency Kurdistan 24 sent a camera crew to Dohuk and reported that they had found the boy.
Numerous other news outlets around the world followed suit and named the boy as seven-year-old Homid who made the famous plastic shirt two years previously because he was such a big fan. He was also seen wearing a standard Barcelona shirt with the number 10 on the back.
