The sort of frauds one hears about these days are simply chilling. We had a close call in our family just a couple of years ago.
There was a proposal for my sister-in-law, that seemed imminently reasonable: the parents looked like they were decent, not to mention religious; the “boy,” as prospective grooms are known, was an engineer based in the gulf; and there was a sister who was widowed, with a child of about five.
After the initial visit from their side to ours, my in-laws went to visit them. Nothing seemed untoward, and while my father-in-law was going to find out everything about them from his more influential friends, it certainly looked like the match would take place.
At this stage, my wife thought it would be a good idea for me and her to talk to that family as well, since we were overseas and weren’t there when the visits had taken place. We talked, and since I’m an engineer myself, I asked the boy what turned out to be rather pointed questions. It emerged that he had studied under my graduate advisor, and while he really did work overseas, some of his senior colleagues were coursemates of mine. I even ended up sending him a LinkedIn invite.
A few hours after our phone call, my in-laws received a rather panicked phone call from the boy’s father, claiming that they had performed an “istikhara,” and that the istikhara recommended not going through with the match.
My in-laws were initially bitterly disappointed, but then we all put two and two together. They broke the match off mere hours after talking to me and my wife. The call had made them suspect we were on to them, or would find out about the scam they had going.
Sure enough, there was more to them than was apparent at first glance. The parents weren’t really the boy’s parents, just his partners in crime. The widowed sister was actually his first wife. The orphaned nephew was actually his son. And the four of them had engaged in previous frauds, hoodwinking well-off girls into marriage, revealing the truth afterwards, and then keeping the dowries and whatnot after the girls inevitably escaped back to their parents’.
A case was filed with the police, but I don’t know if anything became of it.
