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A South American stylist named Larissa Nery, who has been making headlines in India this week after her photograph was splashed over the news in an claim about reported election fraud, has explained that she initially thought it was all a mistake. Or a prank.

But then her social media exploded with activity and people started mentioning her on Instagram.

"Initially it was a few random messages. I thought they were mistaking 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 many people started contacting at the same time and I understood it was real."

Nery, who lives in Belo Horizonte, the capital city 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 Had Happened

What had taken place was the consequence of a media briefing by Indian political figure Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday where he accused 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.

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 declaration with the names of ineligible voters "so that necessary proceedings could be initiated". They did not respond to the particular allegations he made and did not provide statements on Nery's case.

Gandhi has made a number of claims of "electoral fraud" against the election authority 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 duplicates, bulk voters and invalid addresses. He blamed his party's loss in the Haryana election on this reported 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 large 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 lady? How old is she? She votes 22 times in Haryana," Gandhi said.

He clarified that a single stock photo of a woman, taken by Brazilian photographer Matheus Ferrero, had been used multiple times across multiple voter entries under various names. He described Nery as a model who had appeared 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 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, "found me attractive and asked to take photos of me".

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

"I became scared. I cannot tell if it is risky for me or if talking about it could harm someone there. I do not know who is right or wrong because I do not know the groups involved," she said.

"I did not go to work in the morning because I could not even see messages from my clients. Many journalists 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 spoke to me. Some people consider it a meme, but it is affecting me in my career."

The Photographer's Viewpoint

Matheus Ferrero, who captured Nery's photo, is also swamped 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 understand the events of the last few days in a country thousands of miles away.

Some people had contacted 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 said. "I believed it was a fraud. I blocked and flagged it."

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

"People were calling me on Instagram and Facebook. It was terrible. I disabled my Instagram to try to comprehend what was happening. Later I googled and understood what was happening, but at first I had no clue."

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

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

"The photo became viral… reached 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 improperly used. I got frightened imagining this happening to other people I photographed. I felt violated. A lot of unknown people contacting me. You think 'Did I do something wrong?' But I didn't. The website was accessible and I uploaded like countless 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 become alarmed. 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 Circumstances

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

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

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

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