It started with a Facebook friend request from a man named Bobby.
Kirat Assi, a 29-year-old radio host, didn’t usually allow strangers into her private Facebook life. But she’d heard of Bobby, who came from a highly regarded family in their Sikh community in West London. In fact, Ms. Assi’s cousin had dated Bobby’s younger brother, and she’d chatted with him online.
So Ms. Assi accepted. It was 2010 after all, and there was still a general sense of optimism about social media. On Facebook, existing friends were coming together and new ones were readily made. It was a seemingly harmless place, full of funny wall posts, photo albums and an endless amount of pokes.
For Ms. Assi, now 43, that friend request was the start of what proved to be a decade-long catfishing scheme that is the subject of “Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare,” a documentary that began streaming on Netflix on Wednesday.
True crime and catfishing have been popular subjects for documentaries and podcasts in recent years, but in an interview ahead of the release of “Sweet Bobby,” Ms. Assi said that the often frivolous portrayal of catfishing can dilute the very real, long-lasting devastation these scammers inflict. She prefers to use the term “online entrapment.”
“People need to know how bad it gets,” she said, noting neither the documentary nor the podcast that preceded it explained the full extent of the abuse she suffered at the hands of Bobby, as it was deemed too triggering to include.
For six years, Ms. Assi and Bobby chatted online as friends. Then, Bobby got divorced and confessed his love to Ms. Assi shortly after. They dated for three years — chatting, texting, sending intimate voice mail messages and falling asleep on overnight Skype calls. Bobby said he had a stroke, and Ms. Assi cared for him from afar.
Throughout their relationship, though, Bobby never showed his face. He told Ms. Assi that he was in New York, in the witness protection program, after being shot several times in Kenya when a business deal went wrong. It was too dangerous to show himself live on camera, he said, so his old Facebook photos would have to do.
Over time, Bobby became controlling, constantly asking Ms. Assi for her whereabouts. She even quit her beloved radio show to appease him, trusting that it was just a matter of time until they’d be together — that it’d all be worth it. Eventually, the two were engaged, and in 2018, he promised to meet her face-to-face in London.
And then her world fell apart.
The documentary — from the director Lyttanya Shannon and Raw TV, the London-based studio behind true-crime hits like “The Tinder Swindler” and “Don’t F*** With Cats” — tells of the calculated buildup and eventual unraveling of a years-long catfishing scheme disguised as an online romance.
Ms. Assi originally shared her story with Alexi Mostrous, a journalist with Tortoise Media, in the hit podcast “Sweet Bobby,” which incensed listeners around the world in 2021.
The documentary is set to take its place in catfishing canon, a popular subgenre within the true-crime obsession. Later this week, Hulu will release another documentary in that crowded space: “Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara,” about a deception the Canadian indie-pop duo faced for 16 years.
Cultural interest has shed light on the inner-workings of these often intricate scams. Stacey Wood, a professor of psychology at Scripps College, however, is skeptical that it has done much to weaken their potency.
In 2023, more than 64,000 romance scams were reported in the United States, according to the Federal Trade Commission, though the actual number is most likely higher, as many cases go unreported because of embarrassment and shame. In 2023 alone, victims of romance-related scams lost $1.4 billion.
Dr. Wood said that scammers set out to “match” their intended victim’s interests, goals, hobbies, relationships and other important values “and then they just become whatever that is.”
In Ms. Assi’s case, the scammer weaponized their own intricate knowledge of Ms. Assi’s close-knit, minority community — “We work slightly differently,” she said — to create an interconnected web of 60 fake Facebook profiles based on the identities of real-life members.
Ms. Assi considers herself lucky that high-tech tools like A.I. and hyper-realistic deepfakes weren’t around when she was a victim. “If they were,” she said, “I would have been, excuse my language, screwed. Absolutely screwed.” Mr. Mostrous, the journalist, believes it may be only a few years until “capabilities of the technology exponentially outpace our ability to detect when they’re misleading us.”
Catfishing itself is not illegal in the United States or Britain. However, a 2020 civil action filed by Ms. Assi is said to be Britain’s first successful claim of its kind relating to catfishing. Now that the case will reach millions of Netflix viewers, Ms. Assi hopes that her story will help spur social media companies to develop safeguards for online behavior.
“We can’t be scared to change the way we do things online,” she said. Not only that, Ms. Assi wants to see a shift in how catfishing stories are told.
“I’m absolutely exhausted,” she said of having had to repeatedly tell her side of the story. While important, it has put her on the firing line for online trolls and victim shaming.
“We need the perpetrator to be questioned,” she said, “not just the victims.”
The post In ‘Sweet Bobby,’ Catfishing Is Even Worse Than You Might Think appeared first on New York Times.
