Life

Woman Agreed to ‘Sham’ Instagram Wedding—and Ended Up in a Legally Binding Marriage

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An Australian woman has been granted an annulment after an influencer allegedly duped her into marrying him.

“He told me that he’s organizing a prank wedding for his social media,” the unnamed woman in her 20s recently told a judge, The Guardian reports.

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The woman said her groom, also unnamed, invited her to a “white party” in December 2023. The pair met on a dating app and had been seeing each other for three months.

When she arrived, dressed in white, she noticed that the other guests were not. That’s when her influencer beau proposed staging a fake wedding for Instagram views and follows.

“He told me that he’s organizing a prank wedding for his social media,” she recalled. “To be precise, Instagram, because he wants to boost his content and wants to start monetizing his Instagram page.”

The woman claimed her influencer husband tricked her into a marriage as part of a visa scam

She agreed, “enthusiastically” participating in the ceremony for his 17,000 followers. “We had to act to make it look real.”

Following the ceremony, however, the bride realized the ceremony was legitimate. She learned the truth when her now-husband asked her to add his name to her application for permanent residency. Being part of her application could make his own path to residency easier, she said.

The woman said she was “furious” at having been “lied [to] from the beginning.”

While she didn’t dispute her husband’s claim that he had proposed to her just days earlier, she said there was no way she would have agreed to get married without a wedding gown or family present.

The judge also pointed out that her religious beliefs were another point in her favor. The wedding was merely a civil service and not held in a church.

Granting her the annulment, the judge added that it “beggars belief” the bride would agree to the conditions of the influencer wedding, and marry “less than two days” after the proposal.