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A Brazilian hairdresser named Larissa Nery, who has been making headlines in India this week after her image was displayed over the news in an claim about reported election fraud, has explained that she initially thought it was all a error. Or a prank.

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

"Initially it was a few random messages. I thought they were confusing me for someone else," she said. "Later they sent me the video where my face was shown on a big screen. I thought it was artificial intelligence or some prank. But then many people started contacting at the same time and I realised it was actually happening."

Nery, who resides in Belo Horizonte, the main urban center of southeastern Brazil's Minas Gerais state, and has not once been to India, says she searched on Google to understand what was going on.

What Transpired

What had taken place 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 committing voter fraud in last year's election in Haryana state. The BJP has denied the claims.

Hours after the press conference, the Chief Electoral Officer of Haryana shared a letter they claimed they had sent to Gandhi in August asking him to endorse an declaration with the names of unqualified voters "in order 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 number of claims of "vote theft" against the election authority 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 repeated entries, multiple registrations and incorrect locations. He blamed his party's loss in the Haryana election on this alleged tampering of the voters' list.

To demonstrate his claims, he showed a series of slides on a big screen. One of them showed Gandhi standing in front of a big image of Nery, while another showed a compilation of 22 voters with various names and addresses but all with her images.

"What person is this woman? What age is she? She votes 22 times in Haryana," Gandhi said.

He clarified that a solitary 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 been listed on the voters' list under many names, including Seema, Sweety and Saraswati.

The Truth Behind the Image

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 individual in the images."

She explained 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, "found me attractive and asked to photograph of me".

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

"I became scared. I cannot determine if it is risky for me or if talking about it could harm someone there. I do not know who is correct or incorrect because I do not know the groups involved," she expressed.

"I couldn't go to work in the morning because I could not even see messages from my clients. Many reporters were calling me. They located the number of the place where I work.

"I had to remove the salon name from my profile because they were bothering my workplace. My boss even spoke to me. Some people consider it a meme, but it is impacting me professionally."

The Camera Artist's Viewpoint

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

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

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

"I didn't respond. I'm not going to provide someone's name like that. And I hadn't seen this friend in years," he said. "I thought it was a scam. I blocked and reported it."

But since Gandhi's media appearance, "things have exploded".

"Individuals were contacting me on Instagram and Facebook. It was awful. I deactivated my Instagram to try to understand what was going on. Later I googled and understood what was occurring, but at first I had no idea."

Ferrero says some websites placed his pictures next to Nery's photo without permission. "People were creating jokes, like turning it into a game show joke. It's absurd."

In 2017, Ferrero was just starting out as a photographer when he invited 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 permission.

"The photo blew up… achieved around 57 million impressions," 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 misused. I got frightened imagining this happening to other people I shot. I felt invaded. A lot of random people contacting me. You think 'Did I do something incorrect?' But I didn't. The platform was accessible and I posted like millions of others." He's also now made the original Facebook post with her photos private.

"When you see people accessing your Twitter, Facebook, personal Instagram, you panic. The first response is to shut everything down and figure things out later. Some people thought it was amusing, 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 beneficial?

"Yes, I think that would be good. But I don't truly know the specifics," he said.

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