News outlets including NDTV, Zee News, Times Now and ABP fell for a scripted video claiming it was a true video of a 52-year-old woman marrying a 21-year-old man.
BOOM found that the incident was not true and it was a scripted video made by a Faceook page and the man and the woman in the video are actors potraying the roles.
The viral video shows someone recording the incident while the interviewer asks the bride and groom their age. The groom responds and says that his age is 21 while the bride is 52 years old. On their decision to marry, the groom says, "Love has no age. Love can happen anytime. The heart is seen." Both are happy. The bride also says, "I trust him more than you. I have seen three years."
Media outlets ABP News, News24, Zee News Amar Ujala, Times Now, NDTV, India TV, One India, Navbharat Digital, DNA Hindi and many Hindi local media outlets published reports on this viral video.
Apart from this, users are also sharing this video widely on Facebook and Twitter as a true incident.
Click here to view the tweet and the archive here.
FACT-CHECK
BOOM has, in the past, fact-checked several such videos which were actually scripted, but were being shared on social media as real events.
To verify this viral video, we searched all those Facebook pages and YouTube channels which make such allegedly immoral marriage videos for entertainment.
While looking through posts, we found the full version of the viral video uploaded on 22 November 2022 on a Facebook page named 'Desi Chhora K Vlogs'.
At the very beginning of this 10-minute video, a disclaimer appears at the 0:23 timestamp.
According to the disclaimer of the video, all the characters, names, places and events depicted in this video are completely fictitious.
Furthermore, we found this video on a YouTube channel named Prs Trends. The video uploaded on 2 December 2022 has a title that states that the boy married a woman older than him in a temple.
After this, we also checked other videos on the YouTube channel of Prs Trends and found that the groom in the viral video is seen in other videos as well.
In a video uploaded on the same channel on 10 December, the same boy can be seen posing as the groom in the viral video.
The same boy can also be seen in a video uploaded on the Prs Trends channel on 24 November.
In the description of these videos, the channel also identifies itself as 'Paresh Sathalia'.
We also checked Paresh Sathalia's YouTube channel. Most of the videos uploaded here were found to be scripted. We found that there are several videos on Paresh Sathalia's channel which BOOM has fact-checked earlier.
After this, we searched Paresh Sathalia's Facebook page and found a page named Tech Paresh.
Meanwhile, in a video posted on Facebook on 14 September, the same boy was found playing a different character. In this video, the boy is seen saying that he is not in love with a girl and is refusing to marry her.
Taking our investigation further, we also found Tech Paresh's Instagram page. There, in a video dated 11 December, the boy seen in the role of a groom is seen as the boyfriend of two girls.
Whereas, in a post dated 13 December, we came across the woman who appears in the viral video as a 52-year-old bride. In this video, the same woman is seen playing the role of bride and groom with another boy. In this video the boy tells his age as 22 years. We found that the format of this video is the same as that of the viral video. i.e. older bride and younger groom.
We found the same viral video uploaded by the account on December 3, 2022.
BOOM has fact-checked several such scripted videos over the past few months. You can read them here.
