While using Yandex Maps — a map site powered by a Russian search engine — a woman switched to a mode similar to Google Maps Street View, allowing her to get a panoramic view of an area. She wanted to look at a building's exterior, but instead she saw a her boyfriend ... with another woman.
"First I noticed a familiar silhouette," Marina Voinova told Russian site LifeNews, describing the moment she saw her former love on Yandex Maps. "First I thought, 'how can someone else look so similar to my Sasha?'"
"I looked more carefully, zoomed in and saw that it was indeed him," she added. "I realized that he was lying and cheating on me all this time."
Voinova confronted her boyfriend, who did not deny that he'd been unfaithful. (He blamed the infidelity on stupidity, rather than love for the other woman, mind you.) The couple split up.
The strange incident was first reported by Russian site LifeNews while russophile blog Red Hot Russia translated the news story as well as an accompanying video into English. Given this chain, we feared that we could be in the middle of some sort of telephone game scenario. So we searched for the cheating boyfriend on Yandex Maps ourselves.
And guess what? We found him exactly where LifeNews' video suggested he might be, right along with a woman who does not look anything like Voinova, the heartbroken young lady presented in the original report. Unlike its Google counterpart, the panoramic imagery on Yandex Maps does not appear to be censored in any way — on Google Maps Street View, faces are automatically obscured — making it easy to bust the young man.
The lesson here? Don't cheat on your significant other. And if you do — stay away from Yandex's equivalent of Street View trucks.
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