Fraudster ‘duped 27 women into marriage’
A PORTLY 66-year-old is accused of being India’s worst ever marriage con man after allegedly tricking up to 27 women into matrimony and defrauding them of large sums of money.
Bibhu Prakash Swain would abandon his brides soon after the wedding, often taking money or jewellery with him, police said.
The alleged fraudster listed each of his wives in his telephone contacts according to where they lived.
Police finally caught up with him after spending months unpicking a web of fake identities and discovering that he had further weddings scheduled for February and March. Phone records show he was in touch with another 70 to 75 women. His ruse was so elaborate that police doubt he could have acted alone and are looking for people who may have helped him. Detectives said
that while Swain may have been physically unremarkable, he claimed he was on a hefty salary as a senior health official and persuaded a string of middleaged women with high-flying careers to tie the knot.
“He primarily did this for their money, and some sexual pleasure,” said senior police official Sanjiv Satpathy. “He was always very persuasive and only targeted successful single, widowed or divorced women in their late 40s.”
He apparently identified victims by advertising on popular marriage websites. Posing as a 51-year-old doctor, he ensnared women including an assistant commandant of the Indo-tibetan border police, advocates of the Supreme Court and Delhi high court and a doctor. A few days into the marriage he would then plead an emergency
or work commitments and hit the road.
He would quickly move on to his next target, apparently calculating that his victims would be too embarrassed or vulnerable to approach the police.
“Though he looked more than 60 in real life, his victims ignored it while considering his government job. Swain took full advantage of the women’s helplessness and laid elaborate traps,” police official Umashankar Dash told the Hindustan Times.
Swain is also accused of defrauding 13 banks out of almost £100,000 with 128 forged credit cards, and of running a chain of medical labs where doctors and other staff went unpaid for months.
His vast empire of deception began to unravel when one 48-year-old wife by chance discovered that he was already married to at least seven other women.
She trawled through his phone and “quietly retrieved” the numbers of other wives so she could contact them individually about their shared predicament. “This is when we came in and made discoveries about his long history of cheating, impersonation and deceit,” Mr Satpathy said.
Swain was born in a small village in the eastern state of Odisha and first married in 1978, having three children.
He was a trained lab technician, but fell out with his family and moved to the state capital, where he began posing as a doctor and married again.
Swain’s stepmother told reporters she was aghast at his deceit. “About six months ago, he came to the village, but he never told us about his marriages. In any case, he has never cared for us,” she said.