Online matrimonial fraud: The ease and finesse of TanmayGoswamy, who conned eight women of Rs 1.25 crore (24 April 2018, Factor Daily)
The events and people in this story are all true to life. All the women characters have been assigned fictitious names for two reasons: to respect their privacy and to help readers navigate through a complex narrative of nearly 6,500 words.
Paromita was bemused when she received that call in early June 2016.
The 34-year-old software engineer was working at a client’s location, away from her home in Navi Mumbai. So when an inspector from Hyderabad, K V M Prasad, called her about a case, she didn’t think much of it. He enquired about some online money transfers that she had made to someone named Tanmay Goswamy. She told him she did not know anyone by that name.
Back at home that night, that conversation with Prasad stayed with Paromita. The transaction details – amounts, dates etc. – were familiar.
She checked her old transactions. Whatever Prasad mentioned matched with her transactions. But, she had transferred the money to her fiance: Hemant Gupta.
This puzzled her.
Paromita had met Hemant through Bharatmatrimony, an online matrimony portal. It was December 2013. Soon after she created her profile, Hemant had contacted her. He found her phone number from her profile and called her.
Paromita checked his profile and she was impressed. He was an officer of the Indian Revenue Service (IRS) posted in Bengaluru. He came from a wealthy and educated family. His mother was a doctor while his father was an officer of the Indian Administrative Service working in the Union home ministry.
Hemant started calling Paromita often. “In fact, he was chasing me,” she recalls.
They chatted with each other for a couple of months. Then, he came to Mumbai to meet her.
He was a charmer, she says. “He had a knack for figuring out what a girl would be interested in talking about. And he certainly knew the trick to impress a girl. He paid me attention and told me a lot of stories,” she adds.
They started meeting often. He would talk about his job and his family. Though she never met his family, he often spoke about them. He talked about many of his cousins, where they lived and what they did. He would share details of his work and showed her a website, where he logged on using his ID and password. He showed her a page. It displayed his rank and designation in the IRS, along with his residential address.
He spoke about how wonderful their life together was going to be. “He treated me really well. He spoke about the future. All the good things that were going to happen and all the plans he had for us,” she recalls.
“He gave me hope, a lot of hope.”
In 2014, they had a setback. Hemant told Paromita that he was suspended from his job. At the time he worked as the Deputy Commissioner of the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) and was posted in Bengaluru. “He told me ‘I and a couple of friends got suspended from our jobs. I have always done the right thing. But some criminals backed by politicians are harassing and chasing me’,” Paromita remembers him saying.
Hemant gave his documents – passport, voter ID, and driver’s licence – to Paromita for safekeeping.
“He told me he needed money to get his job back. I helped him with a lot of money to see through this time,” she says.
Hemant got his job back and they were planning to marry him in a couple of months when Inspector Prasad’s call came.
The call left Paromita confused. She thought the police were mistaken. Once she returned to Mumbai, she called Hemant. It was late in the night on June 8, 2016. His phone was switched off. “It was unlike him. He had never switched off his phone in the three years I had known him. Never. I was tense,” she says.
Clueless, she Googled Tanmay Goswamy. A Facebook post from the Hyderabad cyber crime police turned up. The post detailed how a man defrauded a woman of several lakhs of rupees after meeting through a matrimony website. The post also had a picture of the man.
“It was him. It was Hemant Gupta,” says Paromita. She sounds more dejected, less angry. She doesn’t sound particularly emotional since she has gone through this moment in her head several times since that day.
From the news reports that followed, she gathered that he was married with a child when he met her. That Hemant wasn’t his real name. His name was Tanmay Goswamy.
“I went numb. I don’t remember what happened or how I felt. I came back to my senses only when my maid knocked at the door in the morning,” she says.
According to the police, Goswamy defrauded Paromita of Rs 35 lakh.
There is no single estimate of the scale of online matrimonial frauds in India but it is big. More than 200 such cases, with a total loss of Rs 5 crore, have been reported in the past three years in Bengaluru, the Times of India newspaper reported in April last year. Pune City Police received 62 complaints of online matrimony frauds (cheating of a total of Rs 3.75 crore) in 2016 while 2017 has seen 54 cases in just the first six months.
Karnika Seth, a Supreme Court lawyer whose core specialisation is cyber law and whose expert views on cyber safety were solicited by the Parliament and the ministry of electronics and information technology for strengthening the cyber laws in India, says she comes across two-three cases of fraud through matrimony websites every month. “I receive a number of queries related to cheating by impersonation where a number of men, and even women, put fake details on matrimony websites. Some of these cases involve money fraud,” she says.
