Brazilian woman becomes the face of fake voters in India

A Brazilian farmer, Larissa Nery, who made headlines in India this week after she dropped the news of the alleged election, told the BBC earlier that it was a mistake. Or a prank.

But then her social media blew up and started tagging her on Instagram.

“At first it was just a few random messages. I thought they were bothering me with someone else,” he told the BBC. “Then they sent me the video where my face appeared on a big screen. I thought it was one or several people who started messaging at the same time and I knew it was true.”

Dery, who lives in Belo Horizonte, the capital city of Step in the South-silz of Brazil, and has never been to India, he checked Google to find out what was going on.

What happened was the fall of a press conference by the Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi where he accused the Narendra Modi Party of last year’s elections in Haryana State. The BJP denied the allegations.

Hours after the press conference, in a post on xHaryana’s chief electoral officer shared a letter they said they sent to Gandhi in August asking him to sign the names of bad voters “so that necessary improvements can be initiated”. They did not respond to the specific allegations he made and did not comment on Nery’s case. The BBC reached out to the poll bottle for the answer.

Gandhi has been making a series of accusations of “vote by vote” against the panel since early August.

In his latest claims, he said his team had looked through the Election Commission’s voter list data and found that of the approximately 20 million voters, 2.5 million were irregular entries – including duplicates, bulk voters and invalid addresses. He blamed his party’s loss in the Haryana Election on alleged voter list manipulation.

To prove his claims, he showed a number of slides on a large screen. One of them shows Gandhi standing in front of a large image of proliferation, while the other shows a group of 22 voters with different names and addresses but all of his photos.

“Who is this woman? How old is she? She has voted 22 times in Haryana,” Gandhi said.

He explained that a stock photo of a woman, taken by the photographer Matheus Ferrero, is often used by many voters under different names. He described Nery as a model who appeared on the voter list under several names, including Seema, Sarasyy and Saraswati.

The 29-year-old confirmed to the BBC that it was indeed him in the photo. “Yes. It’s me. It’s been many years, but it’s me. I’m the man in the images.”

She clarified that she is a hairdresser and not a model and that the photo was taken in March 2017 when she turned 21, outside her home. The photographer, he said, “thought I was good and asked to take pictures of me”.

Now years later, all the attention of the last two days from “people from India, many of the informants”, has left him.

“I’m scared. I don’t know if it’s dangerous for me or if saying it will hurt someone out there. I don’t know who’s right or I don’t know the parties involved,” I said.

“I didn’t go to work in the morning because I didn’t see the messages from my clients. Many journalists called me. They found the number of places where I work.

“I had to remove the salon’s name from my profile because they messed up my workplace. My boss talked to me.

Matheus Ferrero, who took Nery’s photo, was also overwhelmed by the sudden attention. Until recently, he said India was defined by Caminho Das índias – the 2009 Brazilian primetime show – to him.

He is still trying to understand the events of the last days in a country thousands of miles away.

Some people who reached him from India a week back, asked him who the woman in the picture was, he told the BBC.

“I didn’t answer. I wouldn’t give a name to someone like that. And I haven’t seen this friend in years,” he told the BBC. “I thought it was a scam. I blocked and reported it.”

But because the press of Gandhi’s Press by Gandhi, “things exploded”.

“People are calling me on Instagram and Facebook. It’s really scary. I tried my best. Now I recognize what’s going on. But at first I had no idea.”

Ferrero said some websites placed his photos next to Deser’s without permission. “People make memes, like it’s a game show game. It’s not.”

In 2017, Ferrero just started as a photographer when he invited Nery, whom he knew, to come out for a photokhoot. Ferrero explained that he shared the photos on his Facebook and also posted them on the misunderstanding – a photo website – with his permission.

“The photo has raised … reached about 57 million views,” he said.

He has now removed the link from his unscripted account but sent us screenshots taken earlier showing other photos from the shoot.

“I answered them out of fear, because the photos were disturbed. I was afraid imagining other people that I got. I thought that I didn’t do? ‘ But I didn’t. The platform is open and I was uploaded like millions of others. ” He also now makes the original post on Facebook of his photos private.

“When you see people entering your Twitter, Facebook, Personal Instagram, you get nervous. The first reaction is to stop everything.

Neither Ferrero nor he has ever been to India and is still trying to understand how something that happened at the other end of the world could turn their lives around.

We asked Ferrero if all this helped to stop electoral fraud, which is positive?

“Yes, I think that will be positive. But I don’t know the details,” he said.

Dely who has not yet left the country said: “This is far from my reality. I don’t even follow elections in Brazil, let alone in another country.”