Users on social media are sharing screenshots of articles that say billionaire philanthropist George Soros “has been arrested in Philadelphia for election interference”. These reports are false.
At least one article includes a picture of what purports to be the indictment – but the image has been digitally altered to add Soros’s name. A spokeswoman for Soros’s Open Society Foundation told Reuters the reports are “complete nonsense and entirely false”.
These false reports feed into the baseless narrative that there was widespread voter fraud in the Nov. 3rd U.S. presidential election ( here ). U.S. election security officials have said the election was “the most secure in American history” ( here ) and that there is “no evidence that ballots were deleted or lost by voting systems” ( here ).
Some of the articles with the false arrest report have been deleted, but their archived versions can still be seen here and archive.vn/QvTZL .
Posts with screenshots of those false articles are on Facebook here , here and Instagram here .
An image published on YourNewsWire.com on Nov. 23 ( here ) purports to show the indictment against Soros. Reuters reviewed the image with Forensic Beta, a tool for image forensics analysis (here). The tool suggested that the section under “United States of America v.” was digitally altered to add Soros’s name.
A reverse image search showed what appears to be the original document ( here ). That indictment was actually issued against six Russian nationals.
At the time, the U.S. Justice Department said the six Russians had been indicted for a four-year long hacking spree that included attacks against the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics and 2017 French elections ( here .
The article by YourNewsWire.com also suggested Soros is linked to Dominion Voting, a company that supplies election technology and has been target of disinformation since the Nov. 3rd election ( here ).
On Nov. 10, the Open Society Foundation said on Twitter that “neither we nor our founder George Soros has anything to do with voting machines and how they function” ( archive.vn/1kgzY ).
The article also falsely claimed that Dominion Voting tabulation machines “created a 6,000-vote swing” in Michigan”. Reuters debunked this claim here .
It also says that the company’s machines “were used in every single county in Georgia and in several other swing states that just sent their electoral votes to Joe Biden”, suggesting that Dominion Voting is responsible for election fraud. Reuters debunked this allegation here .
George Soros has been the target of multiple conspiracy theories on social media ( here ). Previous Reuters fact checks debunking statements about Soros can be found here , here , here .
VERDICT
False. George Soros has not been arrested for “election interference”, or for any other reason. Articles with the false report include a doctored indictment that has been edited to include Soros name.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here .