Even seasoned true-crime documentary aficionados will be left perplexed and very, very uncomfortable by what unfolds in this recently released watch on Netflix. A large part of that has to do with the fact that Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare feels both relatable and ridiculous at the same time and brings to the fore the dark abyss that is the Internet as well as exposes the shocking depths that human apathy can plunge to.

Exploring a woman’s chilling catfishing experience, the 82-minute watch focuses on Kirat Assi, a well-educated London woman of Punjabi origin, who, after being in an eight-year-long online ‘relationship’ with a man who she fell hopelessly in love with, found out that it was an elaborate catfishing scam carried out by none other than her own female cousin!

Adapted from her hit 2021 podcast, Assi came forward to tell her story in the hope that it will empower other victims of catfishing to seek help. The ordeal, that the 44-year-old narrates herself in the documentary, and which is substantiated by screenshots of messages with the man she believed she was talking to for almost a decade, along with several talking heads, including the victim’s parents who were witnesses to what unfolded, may seem largely implausible, and yet feels disturbingly close to home because in this day and age where a large part of the Internet remains unregulated and prone to misuse, something like this could happen to anyone.

It all started with a Facebook request. Kirat Assi got talking to Bobby Jandu, a handsome cardiologist, on Facebook in 2010. The two had quite a few friends in common — including Kirat’s cousin Simran, who once dated Bobby’s brother. That they belonged to the same community and had common roots in Kenya was a plus for Kirat, who, at age 30 at that time, was being pressurised by her family to “settle down”.

Over the course of eight years, Kirat and Bobby got close, but never met, with the latter always coming up with some excuse or the other, including a ridiculous charade that he was in witness protection in New York after being shot in Kenya. Kirat started getting messages from a new Facebook account attributed to “Bobby”, and she was told that witness protection officials had allowed him to talk to her. This “Bobby” account also connected her to other Facebook “friends” who religiously kept her apprised of his condition.

Kirat would send Bobby voice memos and receive text messages in reply, and she was told that he couldn’t talk to her because the attack had caused him vocal cord damage. Sometimes they would have phone conversations and the voice on the other end of the line would be a faint whisper. And yet Kirat, otherwise a self-aware confident woman, continued to hold on to the hope that she and Bobby would meet and marry someday.

The relationship got serious, and soon “Bobby” was sending Kirat vision boards of their future wedding and her engagement ring. She, in turn, was helping him pick outfits online for his young son from a previous marriage.

Over time, the man who Kirat believed was Bobby became controlling. He forced her to quit her job as a radio jockey because he felt she was getting “too flirtatious” with listeners; she had to send him selfies every hour of the day and even had to seek his “permission” to go to the bathroom (over messages, of course).

All of this may cause most of us to roll our eyes several times, but the gaslighting and psychological manipulation that lies at the core of this story is horrifying.

Kirat uncovered the bitter truth only eight years later when she, desperate that Bobby was avoiding her even after saying he had landed in London, drove down to his home in Brighton. Bobby opened the door, but he couldn’t recognise her. And with good reason. Bobby, a happily married man with a toddler, had never interacted with Kirat in his life! His social media identity had been hijacked to build this elaborate scam, the perpetrator being Kirat’s own cousin, Simran. Reason? Unknown. Bobby, who is also a participant in the documentary and emerges as a talking head after the big reveal, is equally stumped: “How could she pretend to be me for so long? And she’s a girl, doing it to her cousin. None of it made any sense.”

What is even more disconcerting is that Simran was never prosecuted and Kirat, who was told by the police that Bobby, and not she was the victim, lost the best years of her life. “I am not looking for sympathy,” Kirat says in the documentary. “I am looking for people to say this is wrong, we need to be making people accountable.”

Sweet Bobby will definitely leave you with a lot of questions, including many directed towards Kirat. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that catfishing is a terrifying reality. Kirat is now leading a movement to raise awareness of lack of legal protection for catfishing victims. This is a documentary which while it may not be perfectly executed, demands to be watched. And yes, do go easy on unknown friend requests. You don’t really know who is lurking out there.