A Dutch student successfully pranked nearly all of her friends and family by faking a lengthy vacation to Asia using only Facebook, a camera and some creative decorating.
Zilla van der Born, of Amsterdam, spent 42 days pretending to be on vacation in southeast Asia when in reality, she was at home the entire time. According to Gapyear.com, the only person who was in on the joke was her boyfriend.
"She posted pictures of herself eating exotic food in Asian restaurants — it was just that the restaurants happened to be in Amsterdam," Gapyear reported. She posed a similar photo at a Buddhist temple and inside her apartment's swimming pool, which she claimed was the ocean. That fish you see in the picture? Just simple Photoshop magic.
"(She) even redecorated her own bedroom to make it look like an Oriental hotel room so that she could have Skype conversations with her family – at random times in the night, of course – without raising suspicion," the website states.
So why go to all that trouble for an elaborate stay-cation?
"I did this to show people that we filter and manipulate what we show on social media and that we create an online world which reality can no longer meet," van der Born told local media. "My goal was to prove how common and easy it is to distort reality."
