Believing they would be paid a fortune for having sex with women, hundreds of Indian men scammed out of cash – Source: grahamcluley.com

Geeta Pandey at BBC News reports:

In early December Mangesh Kumar (name changed) was scrolling on Facebook when he came across a video from the “All India Pregnant Job Service” and decided to check it out.

The job sounded too good to be true: money – and lots of it – in return for getting a woman pregnant.

It was, of course, too good to be true. So far, the 33-year-old, who earns 15,000 rupees ($180; £142) per month working for a wedding party decoration company, has already lost 16,000 rupees to fraudsters – and they are asking for more.

But Mangesh, from the northern Indian state of Bihar, is not the only person to fall for the scam.

Deputy superintendent of police Kalyan Anand, who heads the cyber cell in Bihar’s Nawada district, told the BBC there were hundreds of victims of an elaborate con where gullible men were lured to part with their cash on the promise of a huge pay day, and a night in a hotel with a childless woman.

So far, his team have arrested eight men, seized nine mobile phones and a printer, and are still searching for 18 others.

But finding the victims has proved more tricky.

“The gang has been active for a year and we believe they have conned hundreds of people, but no-one has so far come forward to complain, possibly because of shame,” he explained.

One victim told the BBC that they had been offered half a million rupees – almost three years’ worth of wages – to just have sex with a woman, and would receive a further 800,000 rupees if she conceived. The scammers sent him photos of several women, asking him to choose which one he would like to make pregnant.

That man ended up paying over 16,000 rupees to the scammers – and shared with the BBC official-looking “baby birth agreement” documents sent to him by the scammers that appeared to have been signed with (and this is bizarre) the name of US TV celebrity “Oprah Winfrey.”

If you’re desperate for money, you may make some foolhardy decisions about how to improve your finances.

Although it’s easy to be scornful of those men who fall for scams like this, believing they would be rewarded well for having sex with women, the people we should actually be focusing our rage on are those who masterminded the scam, and taking advantage of others’ desperation.