A young Sydney, N.S., mother is horrified her two-month old son was listed for sale in an online classified advertisement.

“I just felt disgusted that somebody would actually do that,” Sharon MacLean told CBC News on Tuesday. “It’s kind of sick, when you think about it.”

MacLean found out about the ad on Kijii when Cape Breton regional police visited her Friday night. Police hope to find out who put up the Kijiji ad.

They received a call just after 10 p.m. local time Friday from someone who had seen an For Sale ad for a two-month-old on Inglis Street in Sydney.

Police went to the address listed in the ad and met the parents, checking on the baby at the same time, said Desiree Vassallo, a spokeswoman for the police service. Police are satisfied the parents did not know anything about the ad and were shaken by the incident.

The ad posted the family’s home address, MacLean said, and she is afraid it has endangered her son, Jayden.

“I’m very angry about that. We could have had pedophiles or people come to our house looking for my son,” MacLean said. “It’s pretty serious.”

Vassallo said police believe the ad was a hoax.

“Obviously it was a concerning issue to us and so we did follow up on it to make sure that there wasn’t anything of concern happening there,” Vassallo told CBC News.

“We were able to confirm that at this point, it does, unfortunately, seem like a hoax or a joke.”

Baby not at risk

The ad has since been taken down. Vassallo thinks any danger to the child was short-lived.

“Thanks to the concerned citizen alerting us to the ad, he contacted us as soon as he saw it pop up, so we were able to follow up on this quite shortly after it was posted,” she said.

“So, thankfully, we were able to eliminate what we feel was a risk.”

It may have just been a bad joke but police are taking it very seriously, Vassalo said. They are trying to track down the internet provider address from which the ad was sent.

“We have a member here who specializes in the internet,” Vassallo said. ” We are drawing on their skills help us to track down an IP address.”

MacLean hopes the person who put up the ad is found and is made to realize how it endangered her son.

“Don’t put fake ads on Kijiji because it’s pretty serious and pretty disgusting that someone would go that low to do that and it’s pretty immature,” she said.