Model’s photo falsely liked to arrest of an indigenous man for pretending to be Chinese national
A Facebook post with two photos has been circulating, with the claim that an indigenous man has been arrested in Kishoreganj after posing as a Chinese national who fell in love with a Bangladeshi woman and came to Bangladesh to marry her. But Dismislab’s fact-check found that the photos are from a photoshoot of a model and were originally uploaded four years ago on “Pexels,” a stock photo platform.
A Facebook page posted two photos of a man on November 24. The caption reads, “In Kishoreganj, someone tried to marry after three months of an affair using a Chinese identity and got caught. During questioning, it was revealed that he is an indigenous man 😅. He used the Chinese name Wu Ming Ping, but his real name is Ramel 👉.” The post has been shared 800 times and drew more than 80,000 reactions and around 2,000 comments.
Users posted many hate-filled and stereotypical comments about ethnic minorities.
Several personal profiles, pages, and groups (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) shared the same photo with identical claims. The photo shows a young man in a grey T-shirt. The background appears fully green. The text inside the photo reads, “Tried to marry in Kishoreganj using a Chinese identity; after being caught, he says, ‘I am indigenous’ 😅.’’
A reverse image search using keyframes revealed a photo uploaded in 2021 on “Pexels”, a free platform for photos and videos. The circulated photo matches the original Pexels photo exactly.
Further searches on Pexels revealed an ID named “Shotpot,” which contains several photos from a shoot uploaded on April 29, 2021. Those photos show the same man in multiple solo and family shots, indicating that he works as a model. He also took part in a photoshoot holding a board with the text “#stopasianhate.” The “more info” section on Pexels shows that the photo was taken on March 31, 2021.
A website and a YouTube Shorts video also used the same image from different angles while explaining facial features.
For further verification, Dismislab searched for news reports related to any arrest of any “indigenous youth” in Kishoreganj while pretending to be Chinese in order to marry a Bangladeshi girl. But the search returned no relevant result. One report aired on Bangla TV, however, mentions a woman from Kishoreganj who married a Chinese man after meeting him online. After about a year, she posted a video claiming severe abuse by her husband in China. The photo shown in that video has no similarity with the photo spread online.
So, the photo claiming to show the arrest of an indigenous man is actually from a photoshoot of a model, and it has no link with Bangladesh.
