Two women and two men in Uttar Pradesh’s Banda have been arrested for duping single men into marriage and then stealing cash and ornaments from their homes.
Police in the city said one of the women, Poonam Mishra, would pose as the bride, while the other, Sanjana Gupta, would act like her mother.
The two men, Vimalesh Verma and Dharmendra Prajapati, would identify eligible men and introduce them to Poonam.
After a simple court wedding, Poonam would go along with her husband to his house. There, she would steal jewellery and cash and flee.
According to the police, the gang got away with six such heists, before they were caught last weekend.
Vimalesh, the police said, targeted one Shankar Upadhyay, who was looking for a bride.
Vimalesh took Rs150,000 ($2,395) from the man and introduced him to Poonam.
Then at the court, where Mr Upadhyay and Poonam were to marry, Vimalesh demanded another Rs150,000 from Mr Upadhyay for the marriage process to be completed.
That’s when Mr Upadhyay smelt a rat. He asked for the identity cards of Poonam and Sanjana, who posed as Poonam’s mother.
“I suspected from their behaviour that they were trying to con me,” Mr Upadhyay told NDTV. “When I refused to marry, they threatened to get me killed and frame me in false cases. I said I needed time to think and left.”
Mr Upadhyay immediately contacted the police in Banda who launched an investigation.
Additional Police Superintendent Shiv Raj told NDTV that the two women and two men were later arrested.
During interrogation, they revealed that they had conned six other men before.
In Jaipur, a woman, described by the police as “Looteri Dulhan” or looting bride, has been arrested after she married a series of men and collected a total of Rs1.25 crore ($200,00) from them as settlement.
Police in the Rajasthan city said they arrested the 36-year-old woman after a jeweller filed a case in July 2023 reporting that his “wife” had disappeared with jewellery worth Rs30 lakh, Rs6.5 lakh in cash and other valuables just months after their February wedding.
According to Deputy Commissioner of Police Amit Kumar, the jeweller, a widower, said he met Seema Agarwal on a matrimonial app and they married at a ceremony in Mansarovar.
However, in July, she vanished with the family’s valuables.
Police investigations revealed that Seema, a woman from Dehradun in Uttarakhand, targeted wealthy men through matrimonial apps, luring them into marriage before looting them and filing false legal cases against them,
A special team from Murlipura police station in Jaipur tracked Seema to her residence in Dehradun and arrested her. Her questioning revealed a pattern of similar crimes stretching over a decade.
In 2013, she married a businessman’s son in Agra and allegedly extorted Rs75 lakh by filing a domestic abuse case shortly after the wedding.
In 2017, she allegedly targeted a software engineer in Gurugram, filing allegations of unnatural sex and rape against his cousin and extorting Rs10 lakh.
Police investigation revealed that Seema looked for her victims on matrimonial sites, usually settling for men who were either divorced or had lost their wives.
By marrying in different states, she collected a total of Rs1.25 crore as settlement in various cases.
