Natalia Taylor/YouTube/natalia__taylor/InstagramAn Instagram influencer successfully tricked her followers into thinking she was in Bali, Indonesia, when she was actually just in IKEA.
Instagrammer and YouTuber Natalia Taylor boasts 316,000 followers on Instagram, many of whom believed she was genuinely on holiday in Bali.
While it seemed like a bit of a daft idea, she does prove that it’s pretty easy to trick people into thinking you’re someone – or somewhere – you’re not.
In her first photo, which is captioned ‘The queen has arrived’, she is seemingly talking into a brightly coloured telephone and dressed to the nines – she also geotagged herself in Bali for added effect.
In another photo, Natalia is posing in a bathtub wearing a dressing gown and her hair tied up in a towel.
She captioned this photo ‘Where should I travel to next?’, again geotagging that she was in Bali.
Fans were quick to believe Natalia and no one pulled her up on the fact she was only taking photographs in what she was pretending to be her hotel room. I mean, if you were really in Bali you’d be taking pictures of you in the beautiful scenery, not with a green telephone.
The 23-year-old has since released a video on her YouTube channel admitting it was all a prank.
In the video, she says:
Ah yes, Indonesia, a gorgeous getaway full of tropic paradise and exotic photo opportunities.
It’s the perfect place to fake an influencer vacation and lie to all of my followers.
[…] It’s been said that life on the internet isn’t always what it seems especially in today’s day-and-age where you can pretend to be anyone you want to be, and today I am putting that to the test to see if I can fake an entire vacation by posting false photos and Instagram stories.
You also see in the video the moment her photographer friend conducts a proper photoshoot with her, which wasn’t actually arranged with the store, meaning they could have been kicked out at any minute.
You can watch it for yourself here:
Natalia asked the photographer to purposely leave some of the items’ IKEA tags in view as ‘Easter eggs’ for her followers to see if anybody caught on where they actually were.
20 minutes after posting her first photo, no one catches on.
Natalia dubs the reason her followers believed her because she says she has a good relationship with them and that they wouldn’t expect her to lie to them.
Just goes to show how easy it is on social media to pretend to be living the dream, when you’re really just in IKEA…
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Niamh Shackleton is a pint sized person and journalist at UNILAD. After studying Multimedia Journalism at the University of Salford, she did a year at Caters News Agency as a features writer in Birmingham before deciding that Manchester is (arguably) one of the best places in the world, and therefore moved back up north. She’s also UNILAD’s unofficial crazy animal lady.