Naukri at Shaadi site
By Techgirl

By now most Indians know enough to steer clear of scams which involve Nigerian princes / bankers offering to send us free money after an upfront deposit.  Or to avoid clicking on the link in the email from SBI bank giving a security update especially if my only bank account is with the Bank of Maharashtra.

But some of the online scams have to be seen to be believed.  My first cousin Ramesh is an MBA from an elite institution and within 2 years he has become a senior manager at a Bangalore based BPO.  Like many 27 year old men, his thoughts turned to marriage and settling down and so he registered with a prominent Shaadi website.  He is a paid member and his phone number and even LinkedIn profile are available on this marriage portal.  Within 2 days, he was contacted by a 24 year old BPO worker whom we shall call Barkha (for obvious reasons cannot use her real name).  Barkha expressed interest in Ramesh.  He liked her profile as well and so they met up for coffee at Café Coffee Day, Whitefield, Bangalore.  Within 5 minutes, even before they were served coffee, Barkha was asking Ramesh if he had any vacancies for Team Leaders at his BPO. Yes, there were vacancies.  By 9 am the next morning, she has sent Ramesh her resume. 

At their second date, Barkha told Ramesh that she had scored 2 jobs in the BPO sector by meeting Senior Managers through Indian matrimonial portals.  Not surprisingly, this job application masquerading as a marriage proposal did not get anywhere as Ramesh was on the site to get married and not interview job applicants.

I did not quite believe my cousin Ramesh when he told me the story last month.  But yesterday, while reading America’s most popular women’s blog Jezebel, I came across an American woman who has been using a dating / marriage site Match.com to get men to buy her dinner every day

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A young woman has developed a way to get strangers to cover your entire food budget, including the occasional bottle of $200 champagne. All you need to do is aggressively court men on Match.com and set up a complex dinner date schedule that keeps you well-fed throughout the week. It also helps if you have few compunctions about leading the guys on, and don't mind internet commenters referring to you by a variety of sexual slurs.

23-year-old Jessica Sporty tells Business Insider that though her salary was $45K, she simply wasn't able to make it in New York, and "she needed at least an extra $500 a month and sometimes $1,000 to pay her credit card bills and afford her $1,475 a month apartment in Murray Hill." Rather than shipping out to a less ritzy borough and learning to subsist on ramen noodles and rice and beans, she found that she could do nearly all of her eating for free and keep herself out of debt thanks to men she met on Match.com.
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And I thought I had heard of every scam on the internet.

Techgoss note:  Techgirl is a senior Tech journalist who reports on the IT, KPO and KPO Sectors for a leading media house.  In her spare time, she dabbles in satire in her blog techgirltalk.blogspot.com.  Techgirl has been ejected from Twitter for satirizing an Indian Minister.  Her satire blog has links to her Times of India interview detailing her being kicked out of Twitter, and then being invited back.