A 54-year-old man was arrested from Odisha’s Bhubaneswar on Monday for allegedly defrauding 14 women by marrying them and fleeing with their money.
The accused identified as Bibhu Prakash Swain alias Ramesh Swain posing as a doctor or a high ranking government officer and targeted mostly middle-aged women or divorcees on matchmaking websites, marry them, and then disappear with their money.
Bhubaneswar deputy commissioner of police, Dr. Umashankar Dash told India Today that “His targets were highly-educated and worked in senior positions at various government and private organizations. He had his eyes on their money.”
Prior to his incarceration, Swain had married and conned 14 women from across Punjab, Delhi, Assam, Jharkhand, and Odisha. He would contact them through matrimonial sites, posing as a doctor working for the Union Health Ministry.
According to reports, he has been defrauding women since 2002.
Swain was arrested after a school teacher from Delhi filed a complaint against him after learning about his previous marriages in July 2021. The victim filed a complaint saying that he married the instructor at an Arya Samaj temple in 2018.
Based on the complaint, Swain was nabbed from a rented house in Bhubaneswar’s Khandagiri area. The police charged him with violating several sections of the Indian Penal Code, including 498 (A), 419, 468, and 471.
Swain, a father of five, was married to his first wife in 1982 and got married for the second time in 2002, as per reports.
During the probe, it was also found that Swain was detained in 2011 by a special task squad in Hyderabad for allegedly duping numerous MBBS aspirants out of Rs 2 crore. He had posed as the deputy director-general of the Central Health Education and Training and deceived numerous job seekers across the country.
