‘I Thought It Was a Prank’: Brazilian Woman Caught in India’s Explosive Voter Fraud Scandal

A Brazilian hairdresser has unexpectedly become the face of an alleged voter fraud scandal in India after opposition leader Rahul Gandhi used her image in a press conference accusing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP of manipulating electoral rolls.

Larissa Nery, 29, from Belo Horizonte in southeastern Brazil, told the BBC she was shocked when she saw her face appear on a massive screen during Gandhi’s televised briefing in New Delhi.

“At first it was a few random messages,” she said. “I thought they were mistaking me for someone else. Then I saw the video — my picture was on a big screen in India. I thought it was AI or some kind of joke.”

Within hours, her social media accounts were flooded with messages from Indian users. “I got scared,” she admitted. “I didn’t go to work because journalists were calling the salon. My boss even spoke to me — it was affecting me professionally.”

The controversy began after Gandhi accused the Election Commission and the ruling BJP of adding millions of fake names to the voter list during last year’s Haryana state election — a race his Congress Party lost.

He claimed his team had uncovered 2.5 million irregular voter entries, including duplicate names and false addresses. One of the slides displayed during his presentation featured Nery’s photo — used multiple times under different Indian names such as Seema, Sweety, and Saraswati.

“Who is this lady? How old is she? She votes 22 times in Haryana,” Gandhi said during the press conference.

The image, originally taken by Brazilian photographer Matheus Ferrero in 2017, had been uploaded to the stock photo website Unsplash, where it was freely available for download. Ferrero confirmed that the woman in the image was indeed Nery and that the photo was taken “outside her home when she was 21.”

“I was starting out as a photographer,” Ferrero told the BBC. “I thought she was pretty and asked to take a few photos. I shared them online — I never imagined something like this could happen years later.”

Neither Nery nor Ferrero has ever been to India. Yet their lives have been turned upside down by a political storm 13,000 kilometres away.

“I felt invaded,” Ferrero said. “People were calling me on Instagram and Facebook. I had to deactivate my accounts because of all the attention.”

Nery said she was still trying to process it all. “This is far from my reality. I don’t even follow elections in Brazil, let alone another country,” she said.

India’s Election Commission has yet to respond directly to Gandhi’s claims or to the use of Nery’s image. The BJP has dismissed the allegations as “baseless,” accusing the Congress Party of fabricating evidence to undermine the democratic process.

For Nery, however, the political noise has become a personal nightmare. “Some people treat it like a meme,” she said, “but for me, it’s my face and my life.”