In late July/early August 2025, a video (archived) circulated online that claimed to show a group of raccoons bouncing on two backyard trampolines.
One TikTok user posted the footage in late July with the caption, "Just checked the home security cam and... I think we've got guest performers out back! #backyard #ringdoorbell #ring #racoon #trampoline #fypage #yagirlgabby_#fypシ #fyp#viralIIIIII"
@yagirlgabby_ Just checked the home security cam and… I think we've got guest performers out back! #backyard #ringdoorbell #ring #racoon #trampoline #fypage #yagirlgabby_ #fypシ #fypシ゚ #viralllllll ♬ Jet2 Advert - ✈️A7-BBH | MAN 🇬🇧
The hashtags #ring and #ringdoorbell referred to the company Ring that makes video doorbells. The hashtags appeared to suggest the footage came from one of these devices.
The footage also circulated across Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived), Threads (archived), X (archived), Bluesky (archived) and YouTube (archived). Some of these posts carried similar or identical captions.
However, the video was fake — it was generated by artificial intelligence (AI). We found an early posting of the video (archived) on the Instagram account @kateyproai captioned "Me, Veo3 & 🦝." Veo 3 is Google's AI generation model. The video also included classic hallmarks of AI. For example, the raccoons moved in unnatural ways, suddenly multiplying or disappearing from view.
We reached out to the @kateyproai user to confirm the video was made with AI and await a reply.
A frame-by-frame analysis of the video, which we carried out by downloading and manually scrolling through the footage, revealed obvious faults that meant the footage could not be authentic.
Around the five-second mark, two raccoons bounced on the left trampoline and three on the right. As one of the raccoons on the left trampoline jumped, another raccoon suddenly materialized from its side. Meanwhile, on the right trampoline, the middle raccoon jumped and in doing so appeared to lose its head entirely before landing as a shapeless, gray mass.
(Instagram user @kateyproai/Snopes Illustration)
Snopes has previously reported on fake, AI-generated viral videos about topics ranging from the 2025 Kerrville floods to giant anacondas in the Amazon.