Grooms paid, waited all day — but no brides ever came: India's mass wedding fraud

The parents of Abhishek Varma were eager to arrange their son's marriage, so they turned to a local matchmaker in a nearby village. The man showed them a photo album and let them choose a woman from an orphanage, then offered to arrange a mass wedding ceremony for about $200. The groom was not allowed to meet his bride beforehand.

On the morning of the wedding day in late May, Varma and roughly 40 other grooms from surrounding villages arrived at the venue as early as 8 a.m., dressed in traditional kurta and sherwani attire. The brides never showed up. After waiting at the venue all day, the men finally realized they had been scammed.

According to The New York Times on Thursday (local time), police officer Preeti Kathare, who handled the case, said the victims were rural men ranging in age from their early 20s to their 40s. She added that dozens more victims were believed to have gone unreported out of shame.

The incident, which unfolded in central India, stands out as an extreme case even in a marriage market already rife with fraud. India's wedding industry moves enormous sums of money, making it a natural target for swindlers. Marriage scams are so common — partly because of the tradition of brides' families offering jewelry and other gifts to grooms — that local newspapers run full-page advertisements on how to avoid them. Even so, a fabricated mass wedding ceremony of this kind is exceptionally rare. Ram Lal Bhagat, a deputy inspector with the Madhya Pradesh police, said he had never seen anything like it in 40 years on the force.

About 12 victims came forward, and the self-styled matchmaker was arrested and detained. Indian police said they indicted four suspects on fraud charges in late July, including Dinesh Bairagi, 45, and his brother Mukesh Bairagi, 40. If convicted, they could face up to three years in prison and a fine. The suspects are believed to have collected between 10,000 and 25,000 rupees ($120 to $300) per groom, netting a total of roughly $3,578, according to the investigation. "They exploited the vulnerability of low- and middle-income grooms in rural areas who struggle to find a bride," Kathare said.

Varma, speaking in a phone interview, said the matchmaker told him that orphanage rules prohibited women from meeting strangers. "It was a bit suspicious, but I had no choice other than to follow my family's wishes," he said.

Gaurav Chiplunkar, a professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business who has studied India's rural marriage market, said Indian families generally prefer to marry their daughters to men from a different caste or with a higher income. Because brides' families bear the costs of the wedding and dowry, they tend to seek the most advantageous match they can find.

"The marriage market imbalance is so severe that in some regions there are simply no brides available, or the grooms are far older than would normally be expected," he said. "The very fact that these families are trying to marry their sons to women from orphanages signals how desperate they are — desperate enough to forgo a dowry altogether."

Some state governments in India provide financial support for mass weddings to help ease the bride shortage. Unlike traditional ceremonies that can stretch over several days, mass weddings are shorter and far less expensive, making them a popular choice for families with limited means.

Uttar Pradesh, for instance, provides brides who participate in mass weddings with about $600 in cash and roughly $250 worth of household goods. In that state alone, about 400,000 women from low-income and minority families married through the program in 2024. The fraud scheme exploited precisely the gaps in this mass-wedding culture that has spread under government support.