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Bibhu Prakash Swain believed in soulmates and real love, or so he instructed at the very least 18 ladies he allegedly married and conned throughout India earlier than his arrest — weeks earlier than his subsequent two weddings.
The diminutive 67-year-old scoured marriage web sites posing as a 51-year-old physician and persuaded professors, attorneys, medics and a paramilitary officer everywhere in the nation to tie the knot, police mentioned.
In status-conscious India he claimed he was on a chunky wage, and used pretend identification playing cards and appointment letters to bolster his credentials and household background.
“He primarily did this for his or her cash, and a few sexual pleasure,” senior police official Sanjiv Satpathy instructed AFP.
Satpathy’s staff arrested Swain in current days after months on his path, discovering his a number of identities, financial institution accounts and plans for 2 weddings in February and March.
“He was at all times very persuasive,” Satpathy mentioned, “and solely focused profitable single, widowed or divorced ladies of their late 40s.”
A couple of “joyful and satisfying days into the wedding”, the police mentioned, Swain used to make excuses to borrow his new wives’ cash or jewelry to assist him with an emergency.
He then moved on to his subsequent goal, hoping that the ladies’s circumstances — as a single, widowed or divorced lady who had remarried in a conservative society — would scare them off going to the police.
Investigators consider Swain married greater than 18 occasions and at the moment are going via his cell phone data the place he saved his wives’ contacts — as Madam Delhi, Madam Assam or Madam UP (Uttar Pradesh) — named after the locations in India the place they stayed.
Offended and cheated
Police launched a probe into Swain’s a number of lives in Might 2021 after a grievance by one 48-year-old spouse who, by probability, found that he was already married to at the very least seven different ladies.
The sufferer, feeling indignant and cheated, police say, “quietly retrieved” the contact particulars of his different wives from his telephone and contacted them individually about their shared predicament.
“That is after we got here in and made discoveries about his lengthy historical past of dishonest, impersonation and deceit,” Satpathy mentioned.
Swain, born in a small village within the jap state of Odisha, first married in 1978 and has three youngsters — two of them docs and one a dentist — along with his first spouse.
Skilled as a lab technician, he fell out along with his household and moved to the state capital Bhubaneshwar the place he began introducing himself as a health care provider and finally married a health care provider, his second spouse, in 2002.
“He has since used a number of names however at all times launched himself as physician or a professor whereas searching for wives on-line,” Satpathy mentioned.
The police doubt his ruses had been a one-man job and are searching for individuals who helped him along with his elaborate setups and moved his cash from one place to a different.
The Hindustan Instances newspaper described him as “no Don Juan”, saying he stood simply 5 toes, two inches (1.6 metres) tall, and reported that he married at the very least 27 ladies in 10 states.
For good measure he additionally allegedly defrauded 13 banks out of 10 million rupees ($135,000) with 128 solid bank cards, and ran a series of medical labs the place docs and different workers went for months with out pay, the paper mentioned.
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