The success of online marriage portals in India has encouraged mushrooming of a number of smaller rung sites but it doesn’t mean all of them can help you find your desired life partner. Some are there just to make money. So beware. We will reveal in this article how some matrimony companies are tricking people and making money.

The online matrimony market in India is over Rs. 500 crores. And successful and trusted online matchmaking sites like Shaadi.com, BharatMatrimony.com and Jeevansaathi.com have established people’s faith in the industry. Some little known companies are trying to take advantage of this trust in their attempt to make easy money by tricking people.

Here’s an example. A young man who has an account with popular matrimony websites gets a random email from jeevanjoditata@gmail.com. The email contains an attached word file with several photographs and Bio data of girls (from the same caste as the man) pasted in it. The email is followed by a phone call by a woman executive (In this case Sumita) who calls herself an employee of Jeevanjodi matrimonial. On being asked how she got his number, she replies she got it from some marriage bureau data. She enquires if the person has liked any of the profiles sent on his email and promises to talk on his behalf to the families concerned and also provide phone numbers of the profiles. “But before this you have to take membership of Jeevan Jodi matrimonial by paying a fee of Rs 5,000,” Sumita tells the young man.

Over the next few weeks, she and her other colleagues make several calls to the man and his parents stating that they have already spoken to the family of their choice and the bride’s family was also interested in the match. The only thing that was holding back is he does not have a paid membership of Jeevanjodi matrimonial which is a requirement for making families speak to each other or for providing phone numbers. “The membership fee is for lifetime and I shall be sending you more profiles and speaking to families on your behalf regularly,” Sumita and her colleague Ayesha try to convince the man and his parents.

Knowing fully well about online frauds, the man tells the callers that their website (www.jeevanjodimatrimonial.com) looked too unprofessional, their emails had grammatical mistakes and they didn’t even have a company email address and were using Gmail. But Sumita says she would make it a personal endeavour to help him find a match and manages to convince him and his parents at a discounted fee of Rs 3,500. The next calls are only to make sure that the payment is made quickly into Jeevanjodi matrimony’s account in Jamshedpur branch of State Bank of India.

Once that is done, there are no further calls from Jeevanjodi office which was a regular thing earlier. In fact, when the man calls to enquire, the woman executive just sends an email with phone numbers of the profiles she had sent earlier. The man’s parents find out later that the girl they had liked was not even interested in the match.

The man feels cheated by the company and asks for a refund of his money but there is no response. Even the manager of Jeevanjodi’s Jamshedpur office, Jeetendra Namdev, tries to avoid his calls after listening to the member’s ordeal. None of the staff members either in Jamshedpur office or their Chhattisgarh office were ready to provide name of the company’s owner.

The young man now has an idea how such companies operate. They steal profiles of members from popular matrimony websites such as Jeevansaathi.com and then send them matches according to their choice. “Even the matches are accessed from popular websites and they even have their watermark in the photographs,” the man tells this writer.

In fact, he gets another call from Jeevanjodi’s Allahabad office in the same fashion as the earlier one. The woman executive (Rashmi Gupta this time) sends a list of profiles through email (Email address: jeevanjodimatrimonialald@gmail.com) and makes calls to convince him to take membership of her company. Her email now states that Jeevan Jodi matrimony has “a long experience of 22 years in the field of matrimony service.”

Her email starts like this: “Having known from reliable sources about your marriage proposal , we thought to inform u that  we have  some good proposal  all professionally qualified  from Govt , Bank, Rly , PSU sectors….”

The English is ridden with mistakes and funny as earlier.

“Due to having a vast network of all over INDIA and a long experience of 22 yrs in the field of matrimonial service, we can give u the result  with in a very quick time, becoz the work will be done through our network, our proposal demonstration system is absolutely free  of any charges…,” the email states.

Rashmi Gupta, who works at Allahabad office of Jeevanjodi matrimony office, was not even aware that the man was already a paid member on her company’s site and tried to convince him by saying that the prospective families were very interested in speaking to him. When he informed her that he had already paid membership fee, she stopped making calls.

It has been found that a number of complaints have been filed on online forums against Jeevan Jodi matrimony by families who were cheated by the company. Here’s a link of people’s experiences with Jeevan Jodi matrimony (http://www.complaintlists.com/tag/jeevan-jodi-matrimony/). One member’s family states how he was given fake profile of a girl for his son. A woman member states that she was given phone numbers of men who were already married.

This young man has got similar emails and calls from Bhopal based Humsafar matrimony and a Patna based online marriage company Online Match Point. But he did not take their membership so does not know about the quality of their services. Their modus operandi however was the same.