Gay Marriage Scam
Reeta Loi talks about her experience with The Arranged Gay Marriage Bureau and what legal steps can be taken to have the organisation shut down for good.
When writer, activist and musician, Reeta Loi, signed up to The Arranged Gay Marriage Bureau in early 2019, the journey she was about to embark on was one she’s wasn’t expecting. The Arranged Gay Marriage Bureau is based in India and promised to find life partners for gay men and women who who sign up to their service for a considerable fee. It was founded in 2015, and within a few years it was gaining media attention for its revolutionary match-making service primarily aimed at queer South Asian people. “Part of me felt really excited that this existed whereas another part of me was slightly suspicious,” admits Reeta when I catch up with her over the phone from Los Angeles. “I wanted to know it was coming from good intentions.” After signing up and filming her experience for a new Vice documentary, Reeta arranged a call with the organisation’s founder Urvi Shah. “She won me over,” says Reeta. “She was very charming.” During their first conversation, Urvi really drew Reeta in. “She said, ‘It’s because we act as family because people in the community don’t have family support’,” Reeta explains. “I went through that experience. The fact that she said that she’s acting as a parent and personally speaks to every single person in the database really won me over and hit me in the heart.” Reeta was at a point in her life where she felt she had “lost that cultural connection” with her South Asian heritage, and wanted to date someone within her community. “Going on dating apps it was hard to find people from within my culture,” she says. “It’s hard enough being a lesbian and dating and meeting somebody, but then to add that cultural aspect, there’s so many complexities to being out as a queer Asian woman anyway - it’s a very very small pool.” Reeta wasn’t the only one looking for a potential life partner. Fellow subscriber Keith also signed up at the same time in the hopes of getting himself a husband from the bureau’s supposed 3,700-strong database. But what started as a process expected to last a few months and conclude with a fairytale ending quickly unravelled into a year-long uncovering of a scam organisation taking advantage of vulnerable South Asian LGBTQ+ people. Here we speak with Reeta about her experience signing up to The Arranged Gay Marriage Bureau, how it will negatively affect some of the most vulnerable in our community, and what legal steps can be taken next to have the organisation shut down for good.
What drew you to the service when you first read about it?
For me, there were so many reasons why I was drawn to it. Vice contacted me because they’d heard about this bureau and they’d actually written a piece about it as well. There was a huge media furore about it. I hadn’t heard of it and I was surprised because I work with a lot of organisations and activists in India. I asked around and a lot of people I knew hadn’t heard of it. I had multiple feelings about it. I was intrigued about it. I thought it was great that there was a match-making service available to people in our community, it had really positive testimonials from couples who had signed up to it, it had all this brilliant media that had promoted it, and the gay prince in Rajpipla (Manvendra Singh Gohil) was an ambassador for it, so it had all these amazing endorsements. The woman behind it has publicly identified as straight, so I thought that was interesting. I wanted to interrogate that a little bit more. I was also very curious as to why she was calling it an Arranged
Marriage Bureau. In our culture, arranged marriage is very much the norm and I was supposed to have had one myself. I am the first person in my family to have not done that and also the first person to have come out as gay. I’m proud to say that since then nobody in my family has had to have an arranged marriage. But it’s something that is a part of a culture, so I was really intrigued as to why she called it that and not just a regulated matchmaking service.
That’s one of the things that struck me is that this is an arranged marriage bureau, because same-sex marriages still aren’t legal in India.
Yeah it’s still not legal to be married under law in India. However, religious ceremonies can be conducted, so there can be a religious union but it won’t be legally recognised. So she claims to help facilitate that as well. In terms of arranged marriage, traditionally there is a person who brings two families together and that person usually knows both sides. They will know both sets of parents and will have a view of the compatibility of the potential couple. I was going to have an arranged marriage - that is what was expected of me. I had to meet a potential husband when I was in my early twenties and in that situation my entire family went to my grandmother’s house. She had potentially found a match for me in a family that she knew and he was there with his entire family. In that situation, the families meet and then the two of you are allowed a bit of time together. In my family that was 15 minutes and you’re meant to decide in that time if this is the person you want to spend the rest of your life with. It was something I wasn’t going to do because I already knew I was gay at that point. For some Asian families now it has changed and they will approve a period of time where the couple can date each other before they make the decision. And then for a lot of Asian families there’s no concept of that at all and you’re free to date whomever you choose. But there is a very foundational tradition of arranged marriage in our culture - particularly in our countries of origin.
So you start the process and what happens next?
It took quite a while to get the profiles through. Keith and I were both really excited and were really bonding over the fact that... I was really hoping there was going to be a big gay Bollywood wedding at the end of this. That’s what we all wanted, and ideally it would be mine! We were initially planning to film the documentary over a three-month period, but we ended up filming for 11 months. The reason it took so long is because there were fewer people we could find that would come forward than we expected. Then it seemed to take a really long time for profiles to come through to us. I filled out a really extensive survey that was really personal, which I actually found beneficial because it really helped me think about the partner I wanted and where I was at in my life. I also sent a copy of my passport which I’m now very concerned about since it was uncovered as a scam.
When did it dawn on you that this service wasn’t legitimate?
When I wrote my profile, I’m trying to find myself a partner for life, so I’m going
to sell the shit out of myself, right? I basically wrote this brilliant summary of myself that I thought would appeal to somebody that I wanted to be with. So what was really weird was, not only did it take quite a while before I actually received any profiles back, when I got them they just sounded strange. The two profiles I received were not in the UK, which is what I had asked for. One was based in Canada and the other in the States. The way these profiles were written were not by people who are diaspora, because the grammar around the use of the English language I could tell, immediately, was written by people who are Indian and have been educated in India and have grown up there. The profiles were apparently from women who had been born and educated in the West. So that was the first thing I noticed. The second thing was what they were actually saying sounded bizarre. When I thought of the way I’d written my profile, I was selling myself. But the way these were written... like one said, “I don’t give my trust away so easily” and I thought, ‘Why are you writing that in a dating profile?’ That’s when the main red flag came up.
What was your instant reaction when you found out it wasn’t real?
I was heartbroken that somebody would do this to a vulnerable community, particularly because of the work I do and my own personal experiences. I was also so emotionally invested in it. Spending time with Keith and having to break the news to him...
That was such a horrible moment for him.
That’s when it really hit me. To see his reaction and you could see it sinking in - that frustration. It was after that that I was really affected by it. It got me thinking about all the other people that she has duped. Love is a basic human right. That is our purpose having been born into this world. Why is it a basic human right for everybody except the queer community? In fact, why is it criminalised? There are people out there that will take advantage of that. In a country like India, pre-legislation, there were no safe spaces for people to meet each other. Unless you’re in Bombay which has bars, places to go and a huge Pride event, but even there, post-legislation change, you have to be really mindful. The legislation changes but society takes a lot longer to catch up. But to think there are people who have signed up to this service desperate to meet a life partner, and have no other access to meeting anybody without risking their lives; risking arrest; risking violence; risking corrective rape. This is a reality of what happens in India. These things happen to people I know.
There was obviously a financial motive behind this for Urvi, but have you given it much thought as to what else makes her continue to operate this scam? The fact that she’s gone so public with it and still hasn’t stopped is strange.
The Vice team and I have started to send ourselves a little bit mad trying to understand the psyche of this woman. It seems really strange that she let us make a documentary about her organisation when she was running it in this way. We set up for that confrontation four times and I almost went to India myself to get it. She bailed on us every single time. It wasn’t until the start of this year that we were able to get it. It actually lasted for two hours and I gave multiple opportunities to explain why she was doing what she is doing.
When you confront her you can see that she is clearly lying but it’s almost as though she’s convinced herself.
It’s really bizarre behaviour and I have all kinds of theories. There seems to be an egotistical arrogance about this person that makes them feel that they’re invincible and that their business won’t be flaed up for shut down. She’s still continuing to post and even talking to the media. I’m doing a load of interviews around the documentary and they’re also talking to her. She’s continuing to lie in these interviews and even make up stuff about what’s happened. What she's said is that she did this entrepreneurship course, and they each had to do a project that would help a particular community. So she chose to do something for the LGBTQ+ community because nobody else was doing that. So this is where it came up. It’s a really beautiful idea and it has all these lovely elements to it, but we know she doesn’t speak to everybody because she sent us four profiles that she cannot validate because they are fake. My theory on it from my most loving, compassionate space is that she started it with good intentions as a potential profitable business in anticipation for the legislation to change. My guess is that it didn’t get the level of sign-ups that she was hoping for and in order to keep it going she’s bolstered it up with these fake profiles. She’s sort of thought that if she can keep stringing people along, she can get a bit of cash in here and there, and keep getting promotion - which is what she thought this documentary would get her. I’ve had numerous messages from around the world - particularly in India - from people who have used the service or know her personally and there’s not a single person who’s had a positive experience. There’s still not a single person that she’s been able to provide us with that will validate that they met their partner through the service. There’s still a question around if there’s even any legitimacy behind the organisation and whether there was any intention to ever deliver on it.
What can people do to stop this scam? Have you sought any legal advice or is there any way of shutting down this company so she can’t harm more vulnerable people?
This would be the ideal situation because then it also sends the message to other potential scammers. I have been contacted by a legal team in India who want to follow up on this. At the moment I’m just collating all the information and emails that I’ve been receiving. But that would be something I’d have to talk to the Vice team about and approach it from that perspective. But yes, ideally there must be legal structures in place that are designed to protect people from an organisation like this. I would hope they would be shut down.