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A Brazilian hairdresser named Larissa Nery, who has been making headlines in India this week after her photograph was splashed over the news in an claim about alleged election fraud, has explained that she at first thought it was all a mistake. Or a prank.

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

"Initially it was a few scattered messages. I thought they were confusing me for someone else," she explained. "Then they sent me the video where my face appeared on a big screen. I thought it was AI or some prank. But then lots of people started messaging at the same time and I realised it was actually happening."

Nery, who resides in Belo Horizonte, the capital city of southeastern Brazil's Minas Gerais state, and has never been to India, says she looked on Google to comprehend what was happening.

The Events That Transpired

What had occurred was the consequence of a media briefing by Indian political figure Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday where he alleged Prime Minister Narendra Modi's party BJP and the Election Commission (EC) of engaging in voter fraud in last year's election in Haryana state. The BJP has rejected the claims.

Some time after the media event, the election authority of Haryana shared a letter they said they had sent to Gandhi in August asking him to endorse an oath with the names of ineligible voters "so that necessary actions could be initiated". They did not reply to the specific allegations he made and did not comment on Nery's case.

Gandhi has made a series of claims of "electoral fraud" against the election authority since early August.

In his most recent claims, he said his team had examined 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 incorrect locations. He blamed his party's loss in the Haryana election on this alleged tampering of the voters' list.

To prove his claims, he showed a number of slides on a big screen. One of them showed Gandhi standing in front of a large image of Nery, while another showed a collection of 22 voters with various names and addresses but all with her photos.

"Who is this lady? How old is she? She votes 22 times in Haryana," Gandhi said.

He explained that a single stock photo of a woman, taken by Brazilian photographer Matheus Ferrero, had been used multiple times across multiple voter entries under different names. He described Nery as a model who had appeared on the voters' list under many names, including Seema, Sweety and Saraswati.

The Reality Behind the Photo

The 29-year-old verified that it was certainly her in the photograph. "Absolutely. It is me. Much younger, but it is me. I am the person in the images."

She clarified that she was a hairdresser and not a model and that the photo was taken in March 2017 when she was 21, just outside her home. The photographer, she said, "thought I was pretty and asked to photograph of me".

Now years later, all the focus in the past two days from "people from India, many of them reporters", has left her frightened.

"I became scared. I cannot tell if it is dangerous for me or if speaking about it could affect someone there. I do not know who is correct or wrong because I do not know the parties involved," she said.

"I did not go to work in the morning because I could not even check messages from my clients. Many journalists were calling me. They found the number of the place where I work.

"I had to remove the salon name from my profile because they were disturbing my workplace. My boss even talked to me. Some people treat it like a meme, but it is impacting me in my career."

The Camera Artist's Perspective

Matheus Ferrero, who captured Nery's photo, is also overwhelmed by the sudden attention. Until not long ago, he says India meant only Caminho das Índias - the 2009 Brazilian primetime show - to him.

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

Some people had reached out to him from India a week back, asking him who the woman in the photo was, he explained.

"I didn't reply. I'm not going to provide someone's name like that. And I hadn't seen this friend in years," he explained. "I believed it was a scam. I blocked and flagged it."

But since Gandhi's press conference, "things have exploded".

"Individuals were contacting me on Instagram and Facebook. It was terrible. I deactivated my Instagram to try to comprehend what was going on. Later I searched online and realised what was happening, but at first I had no idea."

Ferrero says some websites put his pictures next to Nery's photo without authorization. "Individuals were making memes, like turning it into a game show joke. It's ridiculous."

In 2017, Ferrero was just starting out as a photographer when he asked Nery, who he knew, to come out for a photoshoot. Ferrero said he posted the photos on his Facebook and also uploaded them on Unsplash - a photo website - with her consent.

"The photo became viral… achieved around 57 million views," he said.

He has now deleted the link from his Unsplash account but he provided screenshots taken earlier that showed other photos of Nery from the same shoot.

"I deleted them out of fear, because the photos were being improperly used. I got frightened imagining this happening to other people I photographed. I felt invaded. A lot of unknown people coming at me. You think 'Did I do something incorrect?' But I didn't. The website was open and I posted like millions of others." He's also now made the original Facebook post with her photos restricted.

"When you see people accessing your Twitter, Facebook, private Instagram, you panic. The first reaction is to shut everything down and figure things out later. Some people thought it was funny, like a soap opera, but I felt invaded."

Transformative Events

Neither Ferrero nor Nery have ever been to India and are still trying to understand how something that happened at the far side of the world could dramatically change their lives.

When questioned if all this contributed to uncover electoral fraud, would that be positive?

"Certainly, I think that would be positive. But I don't truly know the details," he said.

Nery who has not once left the country says: "This is distant from my reality. I do not even pay attention to elections in Brazil, much less in a different country."