Natalia Taylor, a YouTuber and Instagram influencer, pranked her followers into believing she was on vacation in Bali when she was actually filming somewhere much less luxurious: an Ikea store.
Taylor, who used elaborate Ikea showrooms to pull off the prank, said she proved to her 300,000-plus followers that you shouldn’t “believe everything you see on the ‘gram.”
“Bali, Indonesia…The queen has arrived,” she wrote on a photo of herself wearing a bright pink dress and surrounded by wood walls. Taylor left Easter eggs—including Ikea logos—to clue in her more savvy followers, but none seemed to question the validity of the scene.
In a YouTube video uploaded last week, Taylor revealed her Bali “trip” was a total hoax.
“I have such a close trust with my followers… This is really hard for me,” she said after the big reveal.
Taylor shared how confused she was that no one questioned what she believed were obvious fake sets.
She concluded that therein lies the bigger message.
“There is a lesson,” Taylor said. “Don’t trust everything you see on the internet. Sometimes people wanna lie about who they are, and it is not hard to do apparently.”
READ MORE:
- Instagram influencer scams followers out of $1.5 million
- ‘Bachelor’ contestant apologizes for ‘White Lives Matter’ photo shoot
- YouTuber shamed for fake call with Caroline Flack after her death
H/T House Beautiful
