Hyderabad,November 30:Alliances made over dotcoms are crashing in the dusty corridors of family courts of Hyderabad. Lawyers working in family courts say 40 to 50 per per cent cases logging on to the city courts seeking separation in the recent past are of those who met on the net.
In most cases, the snag in these marriages is a pre-existing one, rooted in the profiles uploaded by boys and girls that are laced with lies about their wealth and education. In most cases, say family court lawyers, it is the lies about wealth that have ended alliances.
But there are other reasons too. Take for instance, the case of a young girl who listed the several medals and scholarships she had earned while pursuing her studies. Impressed with her scholastic achievements, a man looking strictly for a working wife ‘expressed interest’ in her profile only to tie the knot with her after a few brief meetings and getting the nod from their respective parents. Trouble started when he started wondering, aloud, why the achiever wife wasn’t working or even trying to look for a job. That his wife was lying to him about her lost certificates and degrees soon dawned on him. Their separation case is now in the court.
In another case, a man posted on his profile that he was the vice-principal of an educational institution but turned out to be a clerk. “In several instances, men say they own lots of properties worth so much when it is not so,’’ says senior lawyer Vani S, citing the example of this lie that surfaces on matrimony websites. She adds that the irony in these cases is that once they land in court, the said properties disappear and the man claims to have no money to give alimony to the wronged wife.
The reason why these fraudulent claims go unnoticed before marriage is the haste and geographical distance between the two partners, says P Sundaraiah, a senior family court lawyer. He says people in two different cities come together to get married and have no common friends to check the credentials of the person as stated in these profiles. Besides, he says, “Money is like opium,’’ adding if either the
girl or boy shows money on the profile, it gets rarely cross-checked these days.
Incidentally, cases of techies working on projects in the US and showing their US salaries as income in their profiles also figures in the list of many frauds. “In reality, once their projects are over their salaries are barely 25 per cent of what they have shown,’’ Vani says. These cases are caught but only post marriage.
Lawyers say that each time they receive a case now, they instinctively know the ones that fall in the dotcom category given the “definite pattern of cheating’’.
—————-Agencies