Sweet Bobby - My Catfish Nightmare on Netflix. SPOILERS

[WTF0]

Posting on here for traffic!

So I understand this documentary was based on a podcast so I’m sure some people may know the story already but what the actual FUCK?!

I wish I could say that I felt sorry for her but I just couldn’t. How do you manage to have a friendship and then romantic relationship with someone online for so long? The fact that her cousin was behind it all was so fucked up but I find it even more fucked up that her family just accepted her being engaged to someone online.

My thoughts are all over the place because I just don’t understand how you can be so desperate to be in a relationship with someone that common sense goes out of the window. As for the cousin, pure evil.

Has anyone else watched it yet?

You need to be Asian to understand, IMHO.
I did feel sorry for her. And baffled by the cousins motive.

@Lentilweaver you need to be Asian to understand why a woman would be engaged to someone she hasn’t laid her eyes on? Okay

To understand the cultural expectations. And the very small pool of eligible Sikh candidates. She wouldn't have dated a non-Sikh.
I agree she was foolish. But I can understand it.

Haven’t seen it but listened to the podcast. Also agree that the motives of the catfish are a complete mystery and if I remember the family wanted it all brushed under the carpet.

Im not Asian and I’m curious as to why I’d need to be Asian I understand this.

she was incredibly naive and gullible.

Personally I was baffled that catfishing is apparently not a crime in the UK. ( Not checked that but that's what I gathered).

I listened to the podcast too.

Apologies! I can see you’ve explained here. Do you really think this was it? Or was she just a bit dim and naive?

Nowhere have I said she should have dated a non Sikh. What she should have done, is used common sense.

Someone is telling you that they’re in witness protection but somehow they’ve been able to contact you and continue to have a relationship with you? They’ve had a stroke but you can’t visit them in person to see how they’re doing? Come on. You cannot be so desperate for marriage and children that you start to justify nonsense. My sympathy is capped

Yes, I do think cultural expectations and family ties played a big role here.She trusted her cousin implicitly. Too much certainly, but thats how many Asian families are.

Oh really, I can believe that tbh. The family played apart in this whole debacle so I can imagine them wanting to brush it under the carpet. The fact that they were excited for her when she announced her engagement to a man online says a lot

I haven’t watched this but I listened to the podcast. In that she didn’t accept that she was gullible. I know what her cousin did was awful and unhinged but I do think you have to question why you believed all of it?

I was torn between sympathy and incredulity. I suppose she got pulled in very gradually and built up trust in 'Bobby' so that by the time things got quite extreme she was already invested emotionally. And you have to remember there were others in her social network all telling her he loved her and reinforcing the lies.
The perpetrator was a master manipulator and probably gave some thought to choosing her victim.
I'd like to think I wouldn't fall for that but, really, who knows?

I was watching this when my husband arrived home from work. I was at the part where she was outside his South Kensington home, so quite far in. I stopped to give a brief synopsis, and we watched the rest together.

He asked me at what point would I have worked out that something wasn't right. I was unaware that the catfish (catfisher?) was her cousin at that point, and thought that it really was Bobby experiencing this catalogue of disasters.

I said the final straw for me would probably have been when he'd been shot 6 times in Kenya, but then ended up in hospital in America, under witness protection. Oh and that one of his friends "managed to get onto his medical team", and was able to update on his condition.

Everything after that would just have been confirmation that someone was playing me for a fool.

I can't even begin to imagine what the cousin's motive was. It's not as though Kirat had sent any money, or had to do anything for him, other than just be on the end of a phone. Jealousy, maybe? Spite, for some reason - just to make Kirat look foolish, and to see just how far she could push her? Kirat lost two jobs because of this relationship. That's serious control over someone, "just because".

I felt so sorry for Kirat. She lost such a large part of her life, firstly to the long-term partner who kept getting cold feet when they were arranging their wedding, and then to "Bobby".

I wonder what would have happened if the family circumstances hadn't prevented her from going to Bobby and Sanj's wedding? I'm sure the cousin would have come up with another scenario whereby Kirat wasn't able to be there

I think you have to understand Sikh culture. She knew he was real, knew the family, he had "real" friends corroborating everything. This was also 10 years ago when cat fishing wasn't that well known a thing.

Yes, I would have likely cottoned on when the witness protection thing was mentioned. Getting shot or beaten up in Kenya, I think , was not uncommon for Indian businessmen. I would also have been suspicious at someone who had never met me tellling me he loved me.

Btw, a similar romantic catfish thing happened to a male friend of my DH's, highly educated and quite sensible in other ways. Didn't carry on for so long, but maybe at least a year.

I haven’t listened to the podcast but apparently it goes into much more detail than the show does. But in the documentary, she constantly mentions marriage and wanting kids. Alongside the pressure that she received from her family and their community. Seeing how her extremely long term relationship ended, she probably just clutched onto straws hoping she’d marry this guy.

I still think at some point, you need to open your eyes and realise that the constant stories are bullshit. It all just sounds so silly especially as this was over the course of 10 years all in all!

You’re absolutely right. I’m focusing a lot on Kirat because I wish she would have used her common sense to realise something isn’t right here. But the cousin is just something else. I don’t even know where to start with her because what was the reason?! Evil as fuck

I think on some level she probably knew something wasn't right but continued to delude herself because the alternative was impossible to bear - disappointing her entire family.

Listen to how much she talks about the shame of being unmarried and childless in her thirties, about disappointing her family, keeping it from her father, how she's a failure, a child, incomplete, nothing without a husband. That kind of cultural pressure and generational trauma runs fucking deep and can overrule the common sense of the most commonly sensible person on earth. Plus the absolute shame of the realisation that she'd been strung along for a decade, possibly lost the chance for children... Admitting that would be hard for anyone.

(Also the cousin was fucking Machiavellian even by catfish standards, 60+ fake accounts in this web of lies, that's wild)

I don’t think I need to understand Sikh culture at all. It’s extremely clear that the family enabled this. The cultural pressure to get married made Kirat feel that without being a wife and having kids, she has no true value. Maybe if that kind of internalised misogyny wasn’t drilled into her, she wouldn’t have been in such a vulnerable situation.

Yes, she knew he was a real person and she knew of the family. She did not know him in real life nor have any kind of relationship with him in person. It doesn’t matter whether catfishing was a known thing or not (it was btw), why are people not using their common sense? No doubt her family was happy for her because he was a doctor/consultant/surgeon and appeared to come from a ‘good family.’ If her family wasn’t so obsessed with her getting a husband, they may have been able to open her eyes and tell her that this situation makes zero sense

So many cultures (including my own) raise their young girls to believe that without marriage and children, they’re worthless. It’s so wrong and so fucked up. I agree with everything you said and it’s just a shame that she was conditioned to believe she was nothing without having a husband.

I feel sorry for her that she was raised to have this mindset. The expectation that she has to please her parents and meet their goals of getting married and having children. Her cousin is just shocking. Imagine having all that time on your hands to be behind all of these fake accounts? How on earth could someone keep up with it for so long?!

I’ve seen some people speculating that she was jealous of her or maybe even in love with her. Having a sexual relationship with your cousin is all kinds of fucked up

I can't understand why she didn't mention to him that she spoke to him in Brighton in the club.

This wasn't a simple catfish case. The perpetrator had MULTIPLE FB accounts that were faking other people in Kirat/Bobby's lives that made the lie even more convincing.

This began when catfishing was early days - FB was only a couple years old and things like MSN messenger were the norm. I got catfished on MSN around the same time but the guy was nice enough to admit to me himself that he wasn't the guy in the pics 6 months after i fell in love.🤣 We didn't facetime because I don't like being on camera at all, still don't!

Yes she should have known better but she literally had fake profiles of people in her own circle who she may not have seen/met on a regular enough basis that convinced her that this was real.

I will say, however, even I at some point would have raised an eyebrow and become a little Sus when the whole witness protection thing and him being shot multiple times was mentioned.
But remember, that happened at a time when it was very easy to convince people of shit like this over the internet.Things like facetime were new but not everyone used it.

Only an absolute fucking psycho fakes multiple people's profiles from a wide circle of people who all know of each other and then uses it to catfish their own cousin for absolutely no reason, and then keep up the ruse for 10 fucking years.

It's very easy to point fingers. But she was coerced and emotionally abused by a disgusting, Spineless, fraudulent master manipulater. She didn't ask for this. I could bet money that if this began in 2019 instead of 2009 she would have sniffed it out a lot quicker.

She lacked common sense in the same way anyone with any vulnerability can lack it, when they are presented with something too good to be true, one part of them feels like they don't deserve something this good whilst the other will convince them to hold onto this thing for dear life because you won't ever get anything close to how great this makes you feel, SO DO EVERYTHING YOU CAN TO KEEP THIS.
To me is speaks volumes on her emotional vulnerability and her clear sense of low self worth. Fuck me, that's actually quite heartbreaking when you think a women could live feeling this way to a point where she manages to be manipulated so outlandishly where she can't even see the wood for the trees. Her family pressures only exacerbated this. In the podcast it was heartbreaking to hear her family's very disassociated reaction to her. Yes, they are partly to blame.

It still happens now, as you know, in all other cultures and walks of life. Difference is hers started YEARS AGO, and the actual level of manipulation, the amount of fake accounts, and the level of intricacy the perpetrator went to speaks more about how intrinsically fucked up the perpetrator is as an individual, than it does about how Kirat lacked common sense.

I haven't watched the documentary but listened to the podcast and completely understand why she was pulled in.

Some of the things that supposedly happened to him are incredibly far fetched but by then, such a level of trust had been built up that she couldn't see it.

Bobby wasn't a random guy that she met online. The catfisher used a photo of someone she knew to be real, she "met" him through a cousin and the WhatsApp groups meant that everytime she expressed doubts, multiple people told her to ignore them. She had also been online friends with fake Bobby for years before it developed into a romance.

What baffles me is not Kirat's behaviour but that of the catfisher. She invested so much time and effort in the scam but I don't see what she got out of it.

This.