Young Woman Uses Photoshop to Fake Five-Week Vacation to Asia, Fooling Friends and Family [VIDEO]
A young woman has tricked her entire family and Facebook friends into thinking she embarked on a five-week exotic vacation, when in fact she remained at home the entire time, Yahoo Travel reported. Dutch student Zilla van den Born used Photoshop to insert herself into dozens of tourist scenes and filtered images to make it look like she was on vacation in Southeast Asia.
She took pictures visiting a Buddhist temple which was actually based in Amsterdam where she lives, uploaded pictures of herself eating Thai food and snorkeling in the “ocean” and even redecorated her apartment to make it look like a hotel room for when she Skyped her parents.
To make the holiday appear more legitimate, she waved off friends and family at the airport prior to the project, before taking a train back home where she remained for five weeks in solitude, manipulating and uploading images on Facebook and Instagram.
Why go to so much effort to create the scam? The 25-year-old played the prank as part of a social awareness project for her university to show how easy it can be to alter reality.
"I did this to show people that we filter and manipulate what we show on social media—we create an ideal world online which reality can no longer meet," she said.
Despite some backlash from the media for her extreme measures and mixed reactions from family members, it appears the budding graphic designer is having the last laugh with all the media attention she has generated.
Check out how she did it:
