Sweet Bobby: The story behind the viral hit catfishing podcast [Video]

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 …