Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Feb 22: A man from Odisha, who the police believe conned women across the country and got married at least 18 times, has been arrested just days before he had lined up two more marriages in the current month and March. He, the police said, was 67 years but always introduced himself to women as a 51-year old doctor or professor.
He always targeted successful single, widowed or divorced women in their late 40’s for wooing through the internet and his “wives” included professors, lawyers, doctors and even a paramilitary officer belonging to different states.
The police said Bibhu Prakash Swain believed in “soulmates and true love” or so he told at least 18 women he allegedly married and conned across India before his arrest. The diminutive 67-year-old scoured marriage websites posing as a 51-year-old doctor and persuaded women of different background to tie the knot and most of the times succeeded.
He claimed he was on a chunky salary, and used fake identification cards and appointment letters to bolster his credentials and family background. “He primarily did this for their money, and some sexual pleasure,” senior police officials who arrested Swain said.
The police managed to arrest him recently after being months on his trail discovering his multiple identities, bank accounts and plans for two weddings in February and March. “He was always very persuasive,” the police said, “and only targeted successful single, widowed or divorced women in their late 40s.”
A few “happy and satisfying days into the marriage” Swain would start making his next move making excuses to borrow his latest wives’ money or jewellery to help him with an emergency. He then moved on to his next target, hoping that the women’s circumstances — as a single, widowed or divorced woman who had remarried in a conservative society — would scare them off going to the police.
Investigators believe Swain married more than 18 times and are now going through his mobile phone records where he saved his wives’ contacts — as Madam Delhi, Madam Assam or Madam UP — named after the places where they stayed. His mobile phone contacts did not carry any name of his multiple wives.
His arrest was also a chanced one. The police started to look for him and probe into his multiple lives in May 2021 after a complaint by one of his “wives,” a 48-year-old woman who accidentally discovered that he was already married to at least seven other women. The woman, feeling angry and cheated, police say, “quietly retrieved” the contact details of his other wives from his phone and contacted them individually about their shared predicament. “This is when we came in and made discoveries about his long history of cheating, impersonation and deceit,” a senior police official said.
From what police recovered about Swain’s past life, he was born in a small village in Odisha and was first officially married in 1978 and from her had three children, two of them doctors and one a dentist. Trained as a lab technician, he fell out with his family and moved to Bhubaneshwar where he started introducing himself as a doctor and ultimately married a doctor, his second wife, in 2002.
“He has since used multiple names but always introduced himself as doctor or a professor while looking for wives online,” the official said. The police doubt his ruses were a one-man job and are looking for people who helped him with his elaborate setups and moved his money from one place to another. For good measure he also allegedly defrauded 13 banks out of ₹ 1 crore with 128 forged credit cards, and ran a chain of medical labs where doctors and other staff went for months without pay, police said.
