A Swiss company that uses AI to match photos of faces says that a Polish woman who says she could be Madeleine McCann is probably not the missing British girl.
The Polish woman Julia Faustyna, who also goes by the name Julia Wendlet, has been saying on Instagram and TikTok that she may be the British girl who went missing as a toddler while on vacation with her family in Portugal in 2007. Their looks and ages are similar, so this is a possibility. She now has tens of thousands of people who follow her because of it.
Christian Fehrlin of AI company Ava-X told Swiss news outlet Blick that based on the company’s analysis of their faces, it is “practically impossible” for Faustyna to be McCann.
Ava-X first matched a picture of Faustyna as a child to a picture of her as an adult. Then, they looked at a picture of Faustyna as an adult and a picture of McCann when she was a child. There was no match.
“You can save yourself the DNA test,” Fehrlin told the outlet.
The AI software takes apart different parts of a photographed face and compares those parts to parts of another photographed face to see if there are any possible matches. Blick said that Faustyna and McCann did not have the same facial features.
Madeleine’s parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, and their three kids, Madeleine, Sean, and Amelie, were on vacation in Praia da Luz, Portugal, when Madeleine was taken from her bed on May 3, 2007. The family lived in an apartment on the ground floor.
Faustyna’s account began posting photos in February. The Polish woman says she has a spot in her right eye and a beauty mark on her cheek that resemble McCann’s. She also claims that details of her childhood do not add up, leading her to believe that she was abducted as a toddler.
“I don’t remember much of my childhood, but my earliest memory is very clear: I was on vacation in a hot place with a beach and white or very light-colored apartment buildings,” Faustyna said in an Instagram post from her account @iammadeleinemccann.
Her Instagram and TikTok accounts quickly got a lot of attention. In a February update, she said that Kate and Gerry McCann had agreed to a DNA test. A family attorney told Fox News Digital that this was not true. Since Faustyna came forward, the McCann family hasn’t said anything on the official Find Madeleine website or its social media pages.
A spokesperson for the Official Find Madeleine Campaign said in a statement that because the police are still looking into the case, Gerry and Kate are not making any statements or giving interviews unless asked by The Metropolitan Police.
The London Metropolitan Police told Fox News Digital that they had nothing new to say about the investigation.
The Met Police said, “We will continue to help our colleagues in Germany with their investigation.”
In 2020, German police named Christian Brueckner, 45, a convicted child abuser and drug dealer, as a suspect in the disappearance of the 3-year-old. However, Brueckner, who is a German citizen, still denies having anything to do with the case.
Brueckner is in prison in Germany because he broke the law about drugs. He is also waiting for a seven-year sentence for raping a 72-year-old American woman in Praia da Luz in 2005.
Through their website, findmadeleine.com, McCann’s family is taking donations to help in the search for Madeleine.