
A man posing as a doctor has been arrested after allegedly targeting and defrauding mostly middle-aged and divorced women to marry them.
According to India Today, Bidhu Prakash Swain, 54, who used the alias Ramesh Swain, would contact the women online posing as a doctor over dating sites and social media. Then, after a few days of marriage, Swain would allegedly leave the women with their families under the guise of traveling for work.
“His targets were highly-educated and worked in senior positions at various government and private organisations [sic]. He had his eyes on their money,” Bhubaneswar DCP Umashankar Dash told India Today.
Norton, the anti-virus and security company, reported earlier this month that According to the FTC, the reports of romance-related online scams have nearly tripled from 2016 to 2020 and reported total dollar losses increased more than fourfold. In 2020 alone, “victims lost around $304 million from being swindled by their cyber sweetheart.” The median amount of money people sent to romance scammers in 2020 was $2,500.
Norton said some warning signs of someone setting up an online scam can include claiming to live far away, claiming to need money and the pace of the relationship moving fast.
“What many of the largest reported dollar losses have in common is that people believe their new partner has actually sent them a large sum of money,” said the report from the FTC. “Scammers claim to have sent money for a cooked-up reason, and then have a…