Woman discovers fake Instagram wedding was real

An Australian woman has annulled her wedding after realizing a fake wedding ceremony she attended on social media was real.

The bride, who she didn’t know, said her partner was a social media influencer, and convinced her to attend the event as a “prank” on her Instagram account.

He only discovered the marriage was real when he tried to use it to apply for permanent residency in Australia.

A Melbourne judge granted the annulment after admitting the woman was tricked into marrying him, in a ruling released on Thursday.

The strange case began in September 2023 when the woman met her partner on an online dating platform. They started seeing each other regularly in Melbourne, where they were living at the time.

In December of that year, the man proposed to the woman and she accepted.

Two days later, the woman attended an event with the man in Sydney. They told her that it would be a “white party” – the participants would wear white clothes – and they told her to make a white dress.

But when they arrived he was “surprised” and “furious” to find no other guests except his partner, the photographer, the photographer’s friend and a celebrant, according to the statement in court documents.

“So when I got there, and I didn’t see anyone wearing white, I asked, ‘What’s going on?’ Instagram because he wants to promote his content and start monetizing his Instagram page,” he said.

He said she accepted his explanation that he was “a social media person” and had more than 17,000 followers on Instagram. He also believed that a civil marriage would only be valid if it took place in a court.

However, he was still worried. The woman called a friend and expressed her concerns, but the friend “laughed it off” and said it would be fine, because if it was real, they would have to file a divorce notice first, which they didn’t.

Relieved, the woman went through the ceremony, where she and her partner exchanged wedding vows and kissed in front of a camera. At the time he said he was happy to “play it” to “make it real”.

Two months later, her partner asked her to add him as a dependent on her application for permanent residency in Australia. Both are foreigners.

When she told him she couldn’t because they weren’t technically married, he then revealed that the wedding ceremony in Sydney was real, according to the woman’s testimony.

The woman later found the marriage certificate, and found a notice of marriage filed the month before the Sydney trip – before they got engaged – which she said she had not signed. According to court documents, the signature on the note bears little resemblance to the woman’s.

“I’m angry that I didn’t know it was a real marriage, and that he lied from the beginning, and wanted me to add him to my application,” she said. .

In his statement, the man said they “both came to terms with the circumstances” and after his proposal the woman agreed to marry him in an “intimate ceremony” in Sydney.

The judge ruled that the woman was “wrong with the nature of the ceremony” and that she “did not give real permission to participate” in that marriage.

“He thought he was acting. He called the event a ‘joke’. It made sense for him to assume the persona of a bride and groom in all things in the contested ceremony, to enhance the credibility of the video, which represented a legally valid marriage,” he stated in the judgment.

The marriage was annulled in October 2024.