Brazilian hairdresser's photo becomes face of alleged Indian election fraud

Larissa Nery, a hairdresser in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, was going about her life when her phone began filling with messages from strangers. At first, she thought it was a case of mistaken identity. Then someone sent her a video. Her face was on a large screen in New Delhi, displayed during a press conference by Rahul Gandhi, the leader of India's opposition party. She assumed it was artificial intelligence, or perhaps an elaborate prank. But as the messages kept arriving, all at once, she realized something real had happened—something she did not understand.

Nery had never been to India. She had to search Google to figure out what was occurring. What she discovered was that her photograph, taken eight years earlier when she was twenty-one, had become the centerpiece of an alleged electoral fraud scandal. Gandhi had presented her image as evidence that the same woman had voted twenty-two times in the 2024 Haryana state elections, each time under a different name and address. The photograph appeared on a massive screen behind him as he spoke, and he posed the question with obvious irony: Who is this woman? How old is she? How did she manage to vote twenty-two times?

The image itself had an ordinary origin. Matheus Ferrero, a Brazilian photographer then early in his career, had taken the photos in 2017 outside Nery's home in Belo Horizonte. She had agreed to the session because Ferrero thought she was photogenic. He published the images on a free-to-use stock photography website, as millions of photographers do. Neither Nery nor Ferrero knew that years later, someone would extract that image and use it to populate fraudulent voter registrations across an Indian state.

Gandhi had been making accusations of electoral manipulation since August, claiming that his team had analyzed voter rolls for Haryana and discovered approximately 2.5 million irregular registrations out of roughly 20 million total voters. He attributed his party's election loss to this supposed tampering. The slides he displayed at the press conference were meant to prove his case—multiple voter records bearing Nery's photograph but different names, ages, and addresses. One slide showed Gandhi standing before an enlarged version of her face. Another compiled all twenty-two fraudulent registrations side by side.

When Nery saw the video, her first instinct was to restrict her social media accounts. She began receiving calls from journalists around the world. The attention was overwhelming and frightening. She did not know if speaking about the incident could endanger her or harm someone in India. Some people treated it as a joke, turning it into memes and late-night comedy fodder. But for Nery, it was affecting her professionally and her sense of safety. She had done nothing wrong. She had simply posed for photographs.

Ferrero experienced his own shock. People were calling him on Instagram and Facebook. He deactivated his accounts to try to understand what was happening. He discovered that websites were using his photographs alongside Nery's image without permission, often as the basis for jokes and ridicule. The photographer removed his images from the internet entirely, fearing they would be misused again. He felt invaded. He questioned whether he had made some mistake, though he knew he had not. He had published his work on an open platform, as countless other photographers do every day.

Both Nery and Ferrero remain trying to comprehend how a simple photography session in a Brazilian city became the focal point of a political controversy thousands of kilometers away. The hairdresser and the photographer had no connection to Indian politics, no involvement in electoral disputes, no awareness that their work would be weaponized in a foreign nation's governance crisis. Yet here they were, their images and names circulating globally, their professional lives disrupted, their sense of privacy violated—all because someone, somewhere, had decided their photograph was useful for making a point about fraud.