They Filmed Dhaka's Slums and Told Millions It Was Delhi — What Prothom Alo Actually Found

For months, residents of one Dhaka neighbourhood watched the same strange scene repeat every day: dozens of foreigners walking their narrow lanes from morning until night, each carrying two phones, filming everything — the tin-roofed houses, the tea shops, the inside of people's kitchens and bathrooms. Then the residents found out what the cameras were really saying. The livestreams were not telling viewers in China that this was Bangladesh. They were telling them it was New Delhi.

What Prothom Alo found in Uttara

The story broke on 6 November 2026, when Prothom Alo, Bangladesh's leading newspaper, published an investigation from Uttara, a suburb of the capital Dhaka. Its reporters visited the Sector 12 and Tekpara area twice — on 27 October and 3 November — and spoke to local residents and 17 Chinese nationals. Tekpara sits beside a canal, and compared with the rest of Uttara it is less developed, densely populated, and home mostly to low-income families. It was, the paper found, precisely the area the streamers had chosen as their set.

Local residents estimate that more than 150 Chinese nationals have been filming in the neighbourhood's streets and alleyways. Prothom Alo is careful on the number: it says no accurate information is available on how many are involved, and even the local police station does not monitor their activity. What is documented is the pattern — livestreams running from morning until night, for months, with the streamers sometimes walking straight into people's homes to record video.

"This is New Delhi"

The deception is in the commentary, not just the footage. Prothom Alo had some of the livestream commentary translated using Google Translate and verified by four Bangladeshis who know Chinese. The analysis found that although the videos are recorded in Uttara, the streamers tell their audiences they are broadcasting from New Delhi, India — and describe what they show in the harshest terms.

On 1 November, a Chinese woman named Mianmian, standing beside the canal in Sector 12, introduced herself as being from China's Sichuan province. "This is New Delhi. Their homes are extremely dirty. There isn't even a fan inside the tin-roofed houses. This place is quite underdeveloped, dirty and unhygienic, and the law-and-order situation is poor," she told her viewers. Another streamer, Wang Wei, filmed people drinking tea at shops in Tekpara and claimed they drink tea made from cow urine — a claim reported through Prothom Alo's translated account of the broadcasts.

When asked, one of the streamers, a Chinese national named Fangyou, said they livestream on the Chinese platform WeChat as part of product promotion activities. Others named TikTok as well. The residents' objection is not to the filming itself but to what it becomes: their neighbourhood, presented to a foreign audience as another country's capital, and their poverty turned into a spectacle with a false address attached.

Why a livestream becomes a geopolitical story

On its own, this could be read as a local nuisance — foreign visitors behaving badly in a poor neighbourhood. What makes it bigger is the pattern researchers flagged when the story spread: foreign creators, localised footage, inflammatory claims, and a deliberate mislabelling that redirects the audience's contempt from one country to another. Researchers who track coordinated online activity say the pattern suggests an attempt to amplify anti-India sentiment while obscuring the content's origins — while cautioning that the scale and sponsorship of the alleged operation remain unclear.

That caution matters. Neither Bangladesh's information ministry nor the Chinese embassy in Dhaka has publicly confirmed the reports, and the platform companies have not issued statements on the specific accounts. The "around 150" figure is a residents' estimate, not an official count. What is firmly established is narrower but still serious: a sustained, months-long livestreaming operation in one Dhaka neighbourhood, documented by the country's biggest newspaper, in which the streamers present Bangladeshi streets as Indian ones to their audiences back home.

It is also a reminder of how cheaply a false geography can now be manufactured. No studio, no deepfake, no doctored map is needed — just a phone, a livestream, and a confident voice saying "this is New Delhi" over footage of somewhere else entirely. The residents of Tekpara knew the truth the moment they saw the cameras. The millions watching did not — and that gap, between what the lens shows and what the voice claims, is exactly where the damage is done.

Read more on Global Insight: on Modi's Diwali in Bastar and why the PM chose India's former Maoist stronghold; on the Delhi Police FIR over an alleged fake Lavrov video; and on the shake-up in the Trump White House after the midterm rout.

Sources: Prothom Alo; OpIndia