When the cops finally caught up with the conman, Ramesh Kumar Swain, who had married and defrauded 27 women across the country, they were surprised by his ordinary appearance—he is a portly 66-year-old man, barely over five feet in height. Yet, he managed to fool 27 women—and educated working women at that.
What was apparently his failsafe bait was a (non-existent) government job, which must have signaled financial stability to the victims. The women were obviously well off themselves, yet they were willing to settle with this man, because being single must have been so difficult for them in a largely conservative society.
In cities, career women can opt for remaining unmarried, but in smaller towns family and social pressure to marry is relentless. A single woman is still an embarrassment to the family; and unless she has a job, money, and a home of her own, is also treated like a burden. Things are worse if the woman is a divorcee or widow over a certain age. When conventional methods of match-making do not work, or if families are unwilling/unable to pay dowry, which must shoot up if the woman has a ‘defect’—and being overage or previously married is considered so in our society—the women try the online matrimonial services, where predators like Swain lurk. Most of the time, the crooks get away, because women are too ashamed to admit that they went online to look for a match and were cheated.
The method tricksters use is so simple and so transparent, that no woman should fall for it, especially after so many cautionary reports in the newspapers—the woman is befriended online, after some time, the man starts asking to borrow money for some emergency or other, which he promises to return and never does. The more brazen hoax is to pretend to send an expensive gift from abroad, which invariably gets caught by customs and money needs to be sent to a particular account to get it through. (Men have also fallen for this, and the sharing OTP con, but they do not pay as high a social cost as women do).
Swain and his ilk, actually marry the women and then run off with their money and jewellery. The sad part is that the woman does not even get any sympathy—how could she be so gullible? People actually snigger behind her back. Among Swain’s victims were supreme court lawyers, chartered accountants, government officials, school teachers, who willingly suspended skepticism in their rush – or desperation– to marry. In this social media age, it is easy to check on anyone. Still, as the new Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler (directed by Felicity Morris) shows, it is possible for a really clever fraudster to create fake social media profiles. It is so common now that the word ‘catfish’ has been coined for the phenomenon of online deception.
In the film, Israel-born Simon Hayut pretends to be Simon Leviev, the son of a diamond billionaire—complete with a phony website, doctored photos and an active Instagram profile showing him partying at swanky clubs and holidaying at exotic destinations. His modus operandi was to dazzle a woman he met on dating app Tinder, with a show of his lavish lifestyle. Once the woman was ‘in love’, he would concoct a security threat, make up stories of enemies due to whom his credit cards were blocked, and ask her for money to tide him over.
Cecilie Fjellhøy, one of the three women featured in the documentary, was taken by private jet to Bulgaria on their first date. Strangely Simon’s ex-wife and daughter were along for the trip, but no alarm bells rang in Cecilie’s head; it may sound like victim-blaming (and she got a lot of that when she went public with her story), but she did not think twice before getting on a plane with a stranger she just met – if nothing else she should have been afraid of stories of human trafficking that she must have undoubtedly read.
Over time, he reeled in Cecilie and the other two women seen in the film– Pernilla Sjoholm and Ayleen Koeleman–with expensive holidays and five-star dinners. The victims were middle-class- really wealthy women would not be taken in by such ostentation—and so enamored of Simon, that they took huge loans to fulfill his demands for money, and were left gobsmacked when he dropped them. He counted on their helplessness and loopholes in the law to make sure his victims never went to the police. They were also afraid of coming to harm, because he knew all about them, and sent vague threats about every action having a reaction.
What he ran was a kind of Ponzi scheme, as a journalist who did an expose said, he used the money extracted from one woman to hook another, and then with amazing ease, juggled multiple ‘girlfriends.’
Cecilie, who was being chased by creditors, was angry and hassled enough to put aside her own humiliation and try to uncover the Simon scam, so that other women would not go through what she did. Pernilla came on board for the documentary too, as did Ayleen, who turned out to be the only woman who swindled the swindler, by persuading him to let her sell his designer outfits and accessories to raise money for him.
The women Simon duped are still under debt, not to mention the emotional devastation (Cecilie had to undergo treatment for mental issues). Simon spent just five months in jail and suffered no severe repercussions for his crimes. He still lives the high life and has a Russian model on his arm.
Back in 1962, Acharya Atre’s satire To Mee Navhech was staged and went on to become a huge success. It was translated from Marathi into several languages, and turned into a Hindi film, Woh Main Nahin (1974- Mohan Segal), as well as Tamil and Kannada versions. (Much later films like Ladies vs Ricky Bahl and Fraud Saiyaan were made on similar subjects.)
It was about a conman called Lakhoba Lokhande (played by Prabhakar Panshikar for over three decades and hundreds of shows), based on the case of real-life conman, Madhav Kazi, who married and cheated a number of women.
Atre had little or no compassion for the women who were cheated; in what would be considered very politically incorrect today, Lokhande says that women get educated and can’t find husbands. So when they reach their late twenties they get desperate, otherwise why would they marry a man without checking his credentials?
Every time a man or woman steps into the witness box to accuse him of deceiving them, he turns around and makes them out to be either foolish, greedy or corrupt. He even proves that the cop who caught him, did not know what the culprit looked like, and simply nabbed an innocent man wearing similar clothes.
Even today, our culture perpetuates the myth of Prince Charming and sells, through cinema, fiction and advertising, the notion of love as the answer to everything. The single woman is still considered a social pariah. In a stunning show of optimism Cecilie has not given up on Tinder, nor on the hunt for love. A lot of women (and men) would like to know how she can trust strangers again, what kind of glue she used to mend her broken heart!
(This piece first appeared in The Free Press Journal dated February 25, 2022)
