Police in UK, Ireland debunk viral AI ‘Cat in the Hat’ hoax as US probes spread

A false image of a giant Cat in the Hat standing on a dark street has moved across TikTok, and police forces in three countries have had to say, on the record, that it isn’t real. The images, built with AI, show the Dr. Seuss character standing outside at night. Some posts have reached tens of millions of views. Police in England and Ireland have issued public statements calling the sightings false, and security officials in the United States are now looking into it too.

How the Images Moved

The trend appears to have started in Ireland, in the counties of Limerick and Wexford, WION reported.

From there it moved across TikTok feeds in the UK and into the United States. One post used the real item from the 2003 Cat in the Hat film, with a line attached asking for help. That post alone had reached 14.6 million views in under a month, according to Quartz, which cited BBC News. Attention grew further from a separate event happening around the same time: on August 8, Propstore announced it was putting the original film item up for sale. That post reached 10 million views on its own, Quartz reported, with people commenting that the item looked disturbing.

Here is a rough timeline of how the hoax moved, based on reporting from Quartz and WION:

1. Late August 2026 — Sightings begin in Limerick and Wexford, Ireland.
2. August 8, 2026 — Propstore’s sale post for the original film item goes viral, reaching 10 million views.
3. Late August–early September 2026 — AI-generated images move across TikTok feeds in the UK.
4. September 3, 2026 — Quartz reports that security officials in Tennessee and Kentucky are looking into the trend in the United States.

Who Denied It

In Ireland, police in Wexford addressed the concern directly. The force made clear that the Cat in the Hat had not been seen near anyone’s home and was not hiding anywhere in Curracloe, WION reported.

In England, South Yorkshire Police rejected claims of a dangerous Cat in the Hat sighting circulating on TikTok. Posts about the alleged sighting drew hundreds of thousands of views, Quartz reported.

The following is a short list of who has answered so far, and where.

What NordBot Found

Cybersecurity firm NordVPN ran the viral images through its AI detection system, NordBot. The company looked at dozens of pictures and found that most had been made or changed using artificial intelligence, according to Yahoo News UK. A common method involved placing the character into otherwise real pictures of real streets, making the false images harder to spot at a glance.

Yahoo News UK reported that the hoax could move beyond phones and screens, with people possibly dressing as the character in real life to alarm others or to gather attention online.

BBC Bitesize placed the trend in a longer history of viral hoaxes that have forced police to speak up. It pointed to the 2016 wave of alarming sightings and the 2019 Momo hoax as earlier examples of a familiar shape: an invented threat, moved by social media, followed by police stepping in to calm things down.

This isn’t the first time an invented threat has forced police to speak up just to stop the concern from moving further.

The Cat in the Hat trend follows that same familiar shape. An image goes up. It gets shared, then shared again, gathering views far faster than any true account can catch up to it. Only after the numbers get large enough — hundreds of thousands, then millions — do institutions step in.

That is what has happened here, from Wexford to South Yorkshire to Tennessee and Kentucky. Police forces have confirmed the obvious: nobody saw a giant Cat in the Hat outside their home. But by the time the denials arrived, the images had already been seen by an audience of millions across TikTok.

AI hoax · Cat in the Hat · deepfake · TikTok · viral trend