MPs have debated catfishing in Parliament and the Crown Prosecution Service has revised its social media prosecution guidelines twice – but online impersonation is not itself a crime. After she confessed to the deception in June 2018, Kirat went to the police, but Simran’s actions did not fit any criminal offence outlined in UK legislation. According to the podcast she had no obvious motive. Simran was a teenager when she created Bobby’s profile. (There was a real Bobby, too, who lived in Brighton and had no idea his images were being repurposed.) He turned out to be an invention of Kirat’s cousin, Simran, a woman ten years her junior, who was running a network of more than fifty fake profiles centred on Bobby, many imitating real people. After a serious accident in 2014, Bobby made Kirat his lifeline, and began to exert strict control over her life in London.
She fell in love with a man she met online named Bobby, a cardiologist living in New York, part of her wider Sikh community. The podcast series Sweet Bobby tells the story of a Sikh woman, Kirat Assi, who was subject to an elaborate online deception that lasted almost a decade.
