An Australian woman had been dating her husband-to-be for a few months in Melbourne after meeting him on a dating app. Then he invited her to a “white party” in Sydney, telling her to bring a white dress to fit the theme of the event. When she arrived at the party venue, the only other people there were the boyfriend, a photographer, the photographer’s friend, and a marriage officiant. The friend explained that he had planned a fake wedding to increase his social media following (he has 17,000 followers on Instragram) and he needed her to play the bride.

She is, I should interject here, an idiot, because she shrugged and said, “Ok!” She did call a freind to ask if there were any risks to being a bride in a “fake wedding,” and the friend said, “Nah! Go ahead!” Here’s another pro tip: if you are an idiot, the chances are high that your friends are idiots too.

And thus it was that the 20-ish woman can be seen on the resulting video playing the love-struck bride, exchanging wedding vows, and eagerly kissing her new “spouse,” all to make the ceremony look real for her partner’s Instagram followers. The problem was that the wedding was real. A month before their Sydney trip, the guy, a foreign national, had filed a notice of intended marriage after forging her signature. After the “fake” wedding, the woman’s boyfriend asked her to add him as a dependent to help him obtain permanent residency, as he was not a native of Australia. That’s when he finally revealed that the wedding was not a social media gag after all.

The befuddled bride petitioned to have her marriage annulled in an Australian family law court, where she said was “furious” and had been “lied [to] from the beginning,” since she would never have agreed to a marriage without a proper wedding and reception. Her wounded hubby disputed her account, saying that immediately after they met, he had told her he was bisexual, and she replied that she was “cool with it,” then moved into his home. He told the court he had proposed to her a day before the wedding, which, he explained, was intended to be “intimate” before an “official” wedding ceremony to be planned for later, and she had agreed to it all.

The judge ruled that the creep was full of hooey and his version of events didn’t add up. “The applicant did not have a single family member or friend present at the alleged wedding ceremony. She was religious,” he wrote. “Precisely why she would participate in a civil marriage and not in a church marriage ceremony went unexplored. It made no sense to me that she would.” The judge also determined that the woman had never moved in with her “husband” as he had sworn was true. The marriage was annulled.

I love this story! It sounds like an “I Love Lucy” episode, or an operetta plot. One of the best Gilbert and Sullivan shows, “Yeomen of the Guard,” is about a woman who accepts money to marry (while blindfolded!) a man about to be beheaded in the Tower of London. He wants the strange wedding in order to foil his treacherous kinsman who has framed him to inherit his land. The wedding takes place, but the prisoner escapes, leaving his bride married to a condemned fugitive she has not only never met, but never even seen.

The Australian woman’s name has been kept private, so we won’t know when she falls for the next scam. I would not be shocked if she ends up married to a kangaroo.