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A South American stylist 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 at first 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 scattered messages. I thought they were confusing me for someone else," she said. "Later they sent me the video where my face appeared on a big screen. I thought it was AI or some joke. But then lots of people started messaging at the same time and I realised it was real."

Nery, who resides in Belo Horizonte, the main urban center of southeastern Brazil's Minas Gerais state, and has never been to India, says she looked on Google to understand what was going on.

What Had Happened

What had taken place was the consequence of a media briefing by Indian opposition leader 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 allegations.

Hours after the press conference, the Chief Electoral Officer of Haryana shared a letter they said they had sent to Gandhi in August asking him to endorse an declaration with the names of ineligible voters "in order that necessary actions could be started". They did not reply to the specific allegations he made and did not provide statements on Nery's case.

Gandhi has made a number of claims of "vote theft" against the poll panel since early August.

In his latest 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 problematic registrations - including repeated entries, multiple registrations and invalid addresses. He blamed his party's loss in the Haryana election on this reported 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 compilation of 22 voters with different names and addresses but all with her photos.

"What person is this woman? What age is she? She casts ballots 22 times in Haryana," Gandhi stated.

He explained that a solitary stock photo of a woman, taken by Brazilian photographer Matheus Ferrero, had been used repeatedly 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 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 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 attention in the past two days from "individuals from India, many of them journalists", has left her frightened.

"I felt fear. 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 incorrect because I do not know the groups involved," she said.

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

"I needed to delete 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 affecting me professionally."

The Photographer'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 primetime show - to him.

He's still trying to make sense of the events of the last few days in a country a great distance 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 been in contact with this friend in years," he explained. "I believed it was a scam. I ignored and flagged it."

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

"Individuals were contacting me on Instagram and Facebook. It was awful. I disabled my Instagram to try to comprehend what was going on. Later I searched online and understood what was happening, but at first I had no clue."

Ferrero says some websites placed his pictures next to Nery's photo without authorization. "People were making memes, like transforming 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 posted them on Unsplash - a photo website - with her permission.

"The photo blew up… achieved around 57 million views," he said.

He has now removed 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 concern, because the photos were being improperly used. I got scared imagining this occurring to other people I shot. I felt invaded. A lot of unknown people contacting me. You think 'Did I do something wrong?' But I didn't. The website was open and I uploaded like countless of others." He's also now made the original Facebook post with her photos restricted.

"When you see people entering your Twitter, Facebook, private Instagram, you panic. The first reaction is to close all accounts and figure things out later. Some people thought it was amusing, like a soap opera, but I felt invaded."

Life Changing Circumstances

Not one of 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 turn their lives upside down.

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

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

Nery who has never left the country says: "This situation is far from my reality. I do not even follow elections in Brazil, let alone in a different country."