In September 2025, news spread across the Internet that a surge in human immunodeficiency virus infections had been recorded in North America. The cause was allegedly the actions of attackers who injected infected blood into toilet paper in public restrooms. We have verified the accuracy of such messages.

Alarmist posts about deliberately contaminating toilet paper contain CCTV footage and/or screenshots from those videos. They show how some people using a syringe inject a certain liquid into the rolls - whether it is blood is difficult to understand from the pictures and videos. The authors of the publications claim that you can encounter toilet paper contaminated in this way in the toilets of restaurants, cinemas and supermarkets. The news spread most widely in the Russian-language segment of the Internet in Telegram, the channels wrote about it “KB plus"(241,000 views), "Gossip"(82,000), "Evil bunny +» (51,000), etc. The news can also be found on other social networks (Instagram, "VKontakte", TikTok). Some publications specify that thousands of people have already become infected with HIV in this way.

“Verified” was unable to find news about alleged mass HIV infections through toilet paper in any reputable media outlet - Canadian, American or international. It is unclear how the videos being distributed could have been filmed: visually they look like CCTV footage, but they are usually not placed in toilets for privacy reasons.

In RuNet, it was mainly screenshots of video recordings that spread, but in the English-speaking segment they spread themselves rollers, designed as fragments of news releases. However, there are no TV channel logos on them. Moreover, the videos themselves, according to the service Hive Moderation, which specializes in identifying content generated by AI, are voiced not by speakers, but by neural networks.

Although Hive Moderation did not find any signs that the footage was subjected to AI processing, characteristic artifacts can be seen in the videos, such as unreadable captions and distorted faces.

Fact checkers Snopes tried to establish the original source of the news and contacted the administrator of the Facebook page, who published one of the first such videos, which received millions of views and tens of thousands of likes and reposts. He replied that he found the video on TikTok and just reposted it without double-checking the content. It was not possible to find the original source of the Snopes and “Verified” videos on TikTok.

The medical community has long come to consensus: It is quite difficult to become infected with HIV this way, since the virus can live outside the human body very briefly. Therefore, even if the viral story were true, dried blood on toilet paper could hardly lead to mass infections.

Despite this, urban legends about HIV surprisingly tenacious and popular. They appeared even before the widespread use of the Internet - for example, in the USSR, such myths were widely replicated after the 1980 Olympics. There is hardly anyone among the residents of post-Soviet countries who has not heard the horror story about contaminated needles that pests place in the seats of subway cars and in seats in cinemas in order to infect respectable citizens.

In North America, this is not the first time that news of alleged malicious infections through toilet paper has appeared. The same rumors were spread in 2024, And a year before - then, however, we were not talking about deliberate infection, but about the fact that drug addicts clean the needles of their syringes on rolls of toilet paper, thereby infecting it. However, even then no reliable evidence was found, except for videos on TikTok.

Thus, there is no evidence that anyone in the United States, Canada, or other countries has recently injected HIV-infected blood into toilet paper in public restrooms. This is just a new twist to the widespread urban legend about attackers trying to infect respectable citizens through needles hidden in seats. This time toilet paper was used - however, this is not the first time either. Very similar messages were spread on the Internet in previous years - just as baselessly.

Cover photo: video from social networks, screenshot “Verified”