Rahul Gandhi's 'mystery Brazilian voter' has multiple LinkedIn profiles

The misuse of a model’s photograph — one that, according to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, appears multiple times in Haryana’s electoral rolls — is not confined to the voter list alone. The same image, originally captured and published by Brazilian photographer Matheus Ferrero over eight years ago, has been repeatedly used on professional networking site LinkedIn to create fake profiles of professionals.

Earlier, the Leader of Opposition addressed a press conference where he presented a report titled “The H Files,” alleging that a Brazilian model’s picture appears twenty-two times in the voter rolls, under different names such as Seema, Sweety, and Sarsawati, among others.

From an Indore-based Senior Software Engineer at Meta to a Cloud Engineer at L&T and an Office Manager in Washington DC, the same photograph has surfaced across several LinkedIn profiles. At least eleven such fake professional accounts have been found using her image — stretching from Los Angeles in the US to Bahawalpur in Pakistan.

Other profiles include a Delhi-based marketing manager, a Bengaluru-based senior software engineer at Amazon, a Mumbai-based interior designer and an Ahmedabad-based engineer at Microsoft. Majority of these accounts appear to be fake and mostly inactive.

The model’s photo has been freely available online for over eight years and has often been used as a generic “symbolic” image of a woman in various blogs and news articles.

“We have crystal clear proof that 25 lakh voters (in Haryana) are fake — that they either don't exist, or they are duplicate, or designed in a way for anybody to vote,” Gandhi alleged during his press conference.

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