Until a few years ago, it was the good old family connections that played a crucial role in arranging marriages, introducing the bride’s family to the groom’s, even if not the bride to the groom. Though proposals came through familiar members of the family, parents went the extra mile, even employing private eyes to do a background check. However, increasingly over the last decade or so, the matrimonial process has undergone a big change, and has almost migrated online. Various kinds of matrimonial sites, offering to find life partners for various communities and groups, have since begun to take precedence in the big hunt. But as things went digital, a number of issues popped up, the important ones being the anonymity for users, the inability to gauge the true nature of people hiding behind aliases, and doctored photos.
More recently, the police have highlighted the alarming trend of prospective brides, bridegrooms and their families incurring substantial financial losses and undergoing trauma because of online fraudsters. Unfortunately, many victims remain silent fearing societal stigma, of being shamed, and its consequences. Most of them do not come forward to file a police complaint. Fraudsters, both men and women, randomly target people who register their profiles on matrimonial sites and a version of the honey trap follows. Having made the initial connect, they establish a false familiarity and switch over to text messaging platforms instead of communicating on the matrimonial sites so as to avoid being detected by the site administration.
