A 24-year-old Russian woman recently got the shock of her life when learning that she had been married to an Egyptian citizen since 2022, about a year after losing her passport.

The unnamed St. Petersburg resident lost her passport in the summer of 2021, but despite declaring the loss to the local police, she never bothered getting her travel document reissued. She didn’t really need a new passport after that and she never imagined that the old one could be used by anyone else, but earlier this year, while trying to have a birth certificate issued for her baby, the young woman learned that her husband, an Egyptian man named Mustafa, needed to be present as well. She had never met Mustafa, let alone married him, but the Russian registry listed him as her spouse.