An Australian woman has called off her marriage after realizing a fake wedding she attended as a social media stunt was actually real.

The unsuspecting bride said her partner, a social media influencer, convinced her to attend the wedding as a “prank” on his Instagram account.

She only discovered the marriage was real when he tried to use it to gain permanent residency in Australia.

A Melbourne judge granted the annulment after admitting in a judgment released on Thursday that the woman had been tricked into marrying.

The bizarre case began in September 2023 when the woman met her partner on an online dating platform. They began meeting regularly in Melbourne, where they lived at the time.

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

Two days later, the woman attended an event in Sydney with the man. She was told it would be a “white party” – attendees would wear white – and told to bring a white dress.

But when they arrived, she was “shocked” and “angry” to discover that in addition to her partner, a photographer, the photographer’s friend and an officiant, she was No other guests were present.

“So when I got there I didn’t see anyone wearing white and I asked him, ‘What’s going on?’. He pulled me aside and told me he was organizing one for his social media Prank wedding, Instagram to be exact, because he wanted to grow his content and he wanted to start monetizing his Instagram page,” she said.

She said she accepted his explanation because “he is a social media person” with more than 17,000 followers on Instagram. She also believed that a civil marriage was only valid if it took place in a court of law.

Still, she worried. The woman called a friend to express her concerns, but the friend “laughed it off” and said it didn’t matter because if it was true they would have to file a notice of intended marriage first, which they did not.

Reassured, the woman attended the ceremony, where she and her partner exchanged wedding vows and kissed in front of the cameras. She said she was excited to “play along” and “make it seem more real”.

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

When she told him she couldn’t because they weren’t technically married yet, he then revealed that their Sydney wedding was real, based on the woman’s testimony.

The woman later tracked down their marriage certificate and discovered a notice of intention to marry that had been submitted a month before their Sydney trip – before they were even engaged – which she said she had not signed. The signature on the notice bears little resemblance to the woman’s signature, according to court documents.

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

The man claimed in his evidence that they “both agreed on the circumstances” and that after he proposed, the woman agreed to marry him in an “intimate ceremony” in Sydney.

The judge ruled that the woman “misunderstood the nature of the ceremony” and had “no genuine consent” to take part in the marriage.

“She believed she was acting. She called the incident a ‘hoax’. She adopted the image of the bride in everything during the ceremony in question to enhance the credibility of the video depicting a legally valid marriage. “This is completely reasonable,” he said in the verdict.

The marriage was annulled in October 2024.