Madeleine McCann: Photo of missing girl is used in travel advertisement, family is “horrified.”

In what is perhaps one of the tackiest advertising decisions ever made, a travel company has used a photograph of a missing girl to promote a holiday discount. 

Madeleine McCann went missing five years ago during a family holiday in Portugal. Madeleine's parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, released photographs of their daughter shortly after she disappeared. One of those photos somehow ended up on the website of a travel firm, VoucherDigg.co.uk, Sky News reported today. Next to the photograph is the tagline: "£20 off: Great discount on holiday bookings."

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Kate and Gerry McCann were “horrified” that Madeleine's image had been used and found VoucherDigg's actions to be “appallingly insensitive," the Daily Telegraph reported.

VoucherDigg declined to comment, BBC News reported. It appears that the travel firm may come under legal trouble: the deal it was advertising was actually offered through another company, Lowcostholidays.com, and that company says that they did not give consent for the advertisement.

"We have no contract with VoucherDigg to advertise our holidays and we are doing all that we can to contact the website and get the picture removed," Lowcostholidays' chief operating officer told the BBC.

"We discovered this vile material yesterday and immediately broke all the [web] links to our site and contacted our lawyers."

Last month, British police released a computer-enhanced photograph of what Madeleine might look like today, but Portuguese police still refused to reopen the investigation into her disappearance.