Just like many other peoples incidents, my mother too received a call/msg from a girl named Priya saying that she’s calling from matrimonylifepartner.com. Since we already have paid memberships with other well known matrimony websites, my mother clearly refused to have another account opened with anybody else especially an unknown website.
But when it comes to mothers daughters marriage, no mother would leave any stone unturned and people working for the said website made use of this weakness. Priya told mother that there’s a very good family who’s interested in my profile and they would really like to take things forward but without us paying the membership fee, they won’t be able to share any contact details. Once they shared the boys profile, which we too liked, my mother told them that she would like to speak to the boys family before making any payment to ensure it was a genuine family. All went well over the call and the boys mother seemed to be very very interested in me, so we made the payment.
Initially they had asked us to pay Rs5000, but since we only wanted details of that 1 particular profile, my mother tried to negotiated & finally agreed at Rs.4000. They shared the contact details of the boy after payment, but we were unable to get through the no. We tried connecting through all the phone numbers we had at home, but no luck. We told this to Priya and instead of helping us out, we started getting excuses such as - I’m not well & not in office, there is corona near my place and blah blah blah. They stopped answering my mother’s calls/msgs eventually.
When a call was made to them from a new no.(my no.) call was immediately answered. When I told my story, the girl who answered the call claimed to be Priya’s junior who had apparently joined just 3 days back, so she couldn’t share the details with me(even though we had already made the payment) and we would have to wait for Priya to be back in office. She also told me to have a look at other profiles which were shared with me. I wonder how come a person, who has joined 3days back, knew everything that was happening with this account BUT couldn’t share correct/alternate contact details with us. This made me suspicious and when I researched this website I found out about all sorts of experiences such as mine.
I simply went ahead and filed a complaint at https://https://cybercrime.gov.in/. The police proceeded with blocking their Paytm account(through which we made the payment) as well as their bank account. Once this was done I again contacted Priya or whoever was handling the account then(almost after 10days), asking for the contact details, but again they asked for 2-3 days more, which we gave. After these 2-3 days, they shared an alternate phone no. which again we couldn’t get through and this led to having long long arguments with the matrimonial website. By now they knew their accounts were blocked and that too by me. Then I had the opportunity to speak with Rashmi or someone who said she was the director of the company and said that we should have told her of our problems instead of getting their accounts blocked. I wonder how we are supposed to tell them anything when they didn’t bother to answer my mom’s calls or msgs. And even when they did answer my calls, they just wouldn’t let me speak even for 2 mins without interrupting me. I even asked them to keep the phone no. & boys profiles with themselves as we were no longer interested in dealing with these spammers and wanted our money refunded, which they denied as it was against their policy. They kept on trying to convince us to have a look at other profiles(which were not even interesting and we couldn’t even get through any phone numbers which they shared earlier). We just told them simply to not bother to look for any other profile for us, but instead just give us contact details for that 1 particular boy(as by now we knew that they were all fake).
With the help of the police, we finally managed to get our full refund and during the last few words that I exchanged with the matrimonial ppl, the girl was now trying to sympathize with me and trying to make me understand their problem when they couldn’t understand my situation, my frustration of not getting our calls answered after making the payment.
Pls be aware of these people and of such scammers in general.
Pls research well before making any payment to save yourself.