An Indian man was recently arrested for allegedly marrying at least 27 well-off women over the last 43 years purely for financial gains.

Ramesh Chandra Swain, a 66-year-old man from Odisha, in Eastern India, stands accused of tricking dozens of women into marrying him by posing as a successful doctor and important official of the Indian Ministry of Health. Swain, who only has a Class 10 education, used fake identity documents to convince his victims, before proceeding to swindle important sums of money and assets from them. Interestingly, most of the women he married over the last decade were very well-educated, ranging from doctors and accountants to Supreme Court lawyers.

Photo: Vaibhav Nagare/Unsplash

Swain married for the first time in 1982, and had two sons and a daughter from that marriage. Since then he is believed to have tricked close to 90 other women, although few of them have agreed to be part of an official investigation, due to fear of stigma from society. However, officials have amassed proof of at least 27 marriages, and 14 of the cheated spouses have so far pressed charges.

According to Indian sources, Ramesh Chandra Swain posed as a deputy director-general under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. He often showed his multiple wives a “rejected leave application” from his office and photos of him next to vehicles with a roof-mounted beacon, to justify being away from home for long periods of time.

The conman, who used multiple fake names and IDs, including Dr Bijayshree Ramesh Kumar, Dr Bidhu Prakash Swain and Dr Ramani Ranjan Swain, would target single, lonely women, and convince them to transfer important sums of money and assets to his name, before ultimately leaving them.

The official investigation hasn’t determined how many wives Swain had at any one time, and how many he married consecutively, but according to The Federal, police found several addresses associated with the serial conman, and at every one of them they also found one of his wives.

Believe it or not, although Swain is believed to have been swindling women for decades, the first complaint against him was lodged only last year, when one of his wives, a teacher, found some compromising texts in his phone. She called the numbers and was shocked to hear that the women on the other end all claimed to be Swain’s wives. She filed a complaint with the police in July last year, and the conman was arrested.

Police later learned that some of the women Ramesh Chandra Swain had cheated over the years had refrained from denouncing him after he threatened to publish intimate videos of them. Still, some of his wives refused to believe that he had lied to them, telling police that they would only believe their words if they came from Swain’s own mouth…

 

If found guilty, Swain could spend up to seven years in prison.