“Part of the reason for having the two people come and appear before a priest or a judge is to make sure it is a freely chosen thing,” said Adam Candeub, a professor at Michigan State University College of Law who has studied proxy marriage. “There are some problems with willy-nilly allowing anyone around the world to marry.”

Technically, the Chowdhury-Ahmmed marriage “took place” in Bangladesh, where it was legally registered, not New York, where the practice is not allowed. Only a few states permit proxy marriages, and most require one partner to be in the military. But the United States generally recognizes foreign marriages as long as they are legally conducted abroad and do not break any laws here.

George Andrews, the operations manager for Proxy Marriage Now, a company in Fayetteville, N.C., that facilitates such unions worldwide for a fee, said technology, like Skype, was driving the growth of proxy marriages. In the seven years the company has been in existence, business has increased by 12 percent to 15 percent annually to between 400 and 500 weddings a year. The share not involving someone in the military has grown to 40 percent.

Some of those couples are trying to circumvent restrictive local laws, like those in Israel and other countries, which recognize mixed-religion marriages but will not perform them, he said. Others who live in different countries seek marriage to pave the way to be together, a first step to attaining a visa or citizenship for a spouse, he said. Couples usually dial in to a ceremony in El Salvador, which has comparatively little red tape surrounding the process.

All people applying for American citizenship through marriage must first be interviewed by officials from the Homeland Security or State Department who are charged with rooting out fraud. Officials said that if the spouses were to explain they had been married thousands of miles apart over the Internet, it would quite likely raise a red flag.

And yet, while the agencies ask interviewees for details of their wedding during the immigration interviews, they do not specifically inquire whether it occurred by proxy.