Sweet Bobby: The story behind the viral hit catfishing podcast (2025)

Stories of catfishing are nothing new, but they usually involve one fake profile or a few at most – not 60. Yet Kirat Assi, a 43-year-old radio presenter and marketer from West London, fell victim to an incredibly complex fraud operation in 2009. Her ordeal lasted almost a decade, with her perpetrator pulling her into a whole fake world by impersonating myriad people. At the centre of it was a fictitious doctor named Bobby Jandu, but behind the screen – her cousin Simran Bhogal.

Now, a new Netflix documentary is bringing Assi’s story to the screen, adapting Tortoise Media’s gripping 2021 podcast investigation, Sweet Bobby, which was downloaded tens of millions of times. Ahead of the show’s release, we caught up with Alexi Mostrous, the journalist who worked on the original story, to talk about what drew him to this investigation and what he hopes telling the story achieves.

“A number of elements [of the story] made it extraordinary,” says Mostrous, Head of Investigations at Tortoise. “We have all heard about catfishing cases in the past, and I was aware at least of the regulatory gap where police and other institutions in the UK aren’t properly equipped to deal with online harms, so that was the context I was looking at.” However, it was the extremes in Assi’s story that made Mostrous want to pursue an investigation. “The fact that she’d been catfished for almost a decade, the fact that it had turned from a situation of playfulness into a dark, coercive situation where Kirat was effectively under the control of the person that was catfishing, the fact that there was no obvious motive – she didn’t get scammed – all of that was really interesting, and that was even before you realised who the perpetrator was.”

The story originally fell into Mostrous’s lap after a lawyer contact told him about a case he was working on. “I was investigating the very unregulated environment that online porn operates in, and he had represented a client who had been harmed in that in that context. At the end of the meeting, he was just like, ‘Oh, I’ve got this other case, maybe you’d be interested in that?’.” He explained Assi’s situation and handed the journalist a witness statement. “It sounded unbelievable. Then, I went home and read the witness statement. I remember thinking, ‘even if 25 per cent of this is true, it’s quite an extraordinary story.’” From there, Mostrous reached out to Assi. The Tortoise team had to put in considerable effort over several weeks to earn her trust, reassuring her that they would handle her story with care and integrity. “Once we’d established the level of trust, then it happened quite quickly after.”

“We had a meeting at Amrit’s [Assi’s friend’s] restaurant, and I just remember that meeting lasting hours and hours. I could see that she wanted to tell her story and that she was just waiting to find a person she could trust.” The Tortoise team invited her to the studio, and then she began going over the details, recording between 9 to 10 hours of tape. One reason the investigation was so effective was because Assi was an unusual subject: as a radio presenter, she had a natural ability to tell her story in a compelling way, but she was also meticulous in gathering evidence. She made a concerted effort to collect, document, and organise almost everything that transpired between her and Bhogal.

When Mostrous and his team first began investigating Assi’s catfishing ordeal, the process was two-fold. The first step was to rigorously verify Assi’s story through hours of interviews and match her claims with a trove of social media messages and documents. While it did help that the perpetrator had already issued an apology, Mostrous’s team still had to be thorough. The second was digging deeper into why the police hadn’t acted more efficiently despite Assi suffering psychological harm. “What is it about the police that prevented them from seeing [a potential crime], and in what other ways was Kirat let down by the institutions that she interacted with?”

It sounded unbelievable [...] I remember thinking, ‘even if 25 per cent of this is true, it’s quite an extraordinary story’

It was also very important to speak to the real Bobby, whose identity had been hijacked. “He’s in many ways a victim as well.” He recalls that one of the podcast’s most striking moments was interviewing Jandu and Assi about the time she came to his house. “From Kirat’s perspective, this was the culmination of a years-long relationship where Bobby had been ignoring her and cheating on her, and finally, she got to confront him face to face; from Bobby’s perspective, he didn't know who this woman was. So to be able to interview both of them about the same thing and then chop and change [the narrative] in episode three was powerful.”

Another fascinating aspect of the story for Mostrous was how Assi’s ordeal wasn’t just a personal nightmare, but one that deeply affected her community. “What should have happened was that as soon as this got out, everyone in her community should have rallied around her and been like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe this happened to you,’” he reflects. Instead, the podcast reveals a sense of distancing, with some people pulling away from Assi after the truth emerged. “Elements of her family and community were bound up in a complicated matrix of feelings, emotions, and traditions,” creating somewhat unexpected tensions.

There is no doubt that those listening to the podcast or watching the documentary will raise questions about why it took Assi so long to realise she was being catfished. “I don’t want to speak for Kirat, but I think she was in a particular place and time in her life when she was potentially quite exposed. People forget that not only did she bump into the real Bobby in Brighton, she also had a real-life friend, who she really trusted, telling her that she saw Bobby in the flesh in hospital.” Alexi believes this catfish could have easily fooled far more people than the audience might realise, given the extraordinary level of sophistication involved. “Questions are always going to be asked, but I’m definitely on the side of being sympathetic towards Kirat rather than questioning how she could fall for it, because it was almost a military operation.”

Mostrous is glad that the documentary will “continue to give Kirat a voice, because she didn’t have a voice for a long time, and she deserves one.” He also hopes it will shine more light on the issue of online harm by pushing institutions like the police to take these cases more seriously. When thinking about the argument of introducing more specific catfishing regulations, he says it gets tricky, especially when perpetrators’ motivations can vary greatly. “It’s really interesting psychologically. Is it about controlling others? Is it about [catfishers] exercising control over their own life because it feels out of control everywhere else? I would love to interview a serial catfisher and just dig into the motivation behind what they do.”

More importantly, how far does more regulation encroach into free speech? “If I put down that I’m six foot four on a Facebook profile, and I’m only six foot one, at what point does a misrepresentation potentially cross into a criminal case?” Instead, Alexi believes that if the police were more clued up on online harms, existing laws against coercive control and fraudulent behaviour could be applied much more rigorously than they are today. “I think that the more exposure we can give to stories about online harm, the more we can close the gap between the protection offered to people online through our institutions, such as our police, schools and courts.”

Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare is streaming on Netflix from Wednesday 16 October.