Bibhu Prakash Swain believed in soulmates and real love, according to hundreds of women he allegedly married and duped across India before his arrest in Bhubaneswar, the capital of eastern Odisha state, more than a week ago.
Investigators suspect Swain married 18 times and are now looking through his phone records to see if he stored his wives’ contacts as Madam Delhi, Madam Assam, or Madam UP (Uttar Pradesh), all of which are named after places in India where they dwelt.
He was described as “no Don Juan” by the Hindustan Times newspaper, who said he was only five feet two inches (1.6 meters) tall and had married at least 27 women in ten states.
“He mostly did this for their money and some sexual pleasure,” said Sanjiv Satpathy, a senior police official.
According to authorities, the little 67-year-old posed as a 51-year-old doctor and persuaded professors, attorneys, medics, and a paramilitary officer to marry all around the country.
He pretended to be on a large salary in status-conscious India, and he used forged identification cards and appointment letters to strengthen his credentials and family background.
In India, Love, and Faith | 101 Swain was apprehended less than ten days ago by East Satpathy’s team, who had been on his trail for months and had discovered his various identities, bank accounts, and plans for two marriages in February and March.
Satpathy explained, “He was always highly persuasive and only targeted successful single, widowed, or divorced ladies in their late 40s.”
Swain would fabricate excuses to borrow his new wife’s money or jewelry to help him with an emergency a few “pleasant and satisfying days into the marriage,” according to the police.
He then went on to his next victim, thinking that the women’s situation – as a single, widowed, or divorced lady who had remarried in a conservative country – would deter them from reporting the crime to the authorities.
He also allegedly scammed 13 banks of ten million rupees ($135,000) using 128 counterfeit credit cards, and managed a chain of medical labs where physicians and other personnel went without pay for months, according to the Hindustan Times new paper.
After a complaint from one 48-year-old wife who learned that he was already married to at least seven other women, police initiated an investigation into Swain’s various lives in May 2021.
The victim enraged and betrayed, “quietly collected” the contact information of his other spouses from his phone and called them individually about their common dilemma, according to authorities.
Satpathy explained, “This is when we came in and discovered about his extensive history of cheating, impersonation, and deception.”
Swain, who was born in a small hamlet in Odisha, married for the first time in 1978 and has three children with his first wife, two of whom are doctors and one of whom is a dentist.
He was trained as a lab technician, but after falling out with his family, he relocated to Bhubaneswar and began introducing himself as a doctor, eventually marrying a doctor, his second wife, in 2002.
“He’s gone under several names since then, but when hunting for spouses online, he always introduced himself as a doctor or a professor,” Satpathy added.
The police are hunting for those who assisted him with his intricate preparations and transported his money from one location to another since they don’t believe his ruses were a one-man show.
