I’m sure everyone’s been in that position where
you’ve had a message from someone you vaguely know.
I wasn’t online looking for love at all.
This is one of the most complex, convoluted, sophisticated,
screwed-up catfishing cases that I’ve ever come across.
He was always picking fights with me,
constantly picking fights with me.
You know, he’d be very horrible
and then extremely nice for short periods of time.
I was living in fear.
Someone can be coercively controlled in numerous different ways
by someone that they have never met.
It was like the responsibility for Bobby’s life
was in my hands.
So Bobby was at the heart of this scam,
but he was only one character.
And it went on for a very long time.
And there were many characters, let's call them,
that were slowly introduced and legitimized
over a long period of time.
The catfisher used more than 60 fake accounts.
In real life, if someone knows you
and decides to use the internet to target you,
you’ve got no hope.
I thought you loved me.
I love you, but I can’t do this.
[INVESTIGATORS]
I’m Alexi Mostrous. I’m head of investigations at Tortoise Media,
and I’m the host and reporter of the
My name’s Harkirat Kaur Assi, and most people know me as Kirat.
I’m a freelance marketing consultant,
and I also do some radio and work in the media.
So Alexi had seen my witness statement
and was intrigued about what had happened to me.
It was obvious that even if part of the witness statement was true,
that this was an extraordinary story.
Why had the police taken no interest in Kirat’s case?
And was a crime actually committed?
For some reason, the perpetrator deliberately targeted me.
I don't know why.
Kirat was quite nervous about telling her story,
but she had a determination to tell it.
So quite early on in the process,
I teamed up with a colleague of mine at Tortoise called Claudia.
I’m Claudia Williams.
I’m a reporter and producer at Tortoise.
My first impression of Kirat was that she was really warm
and you could just tell that she was really keen
to get this story out there.
So the way the scam started was like this.
In 2009, Kirat was first contacted by a guy called JJ,
and he was a boyfriend of Kirat’s younger cousin Simran.
I’m sure everyone’s been in that position
where you’ve had a message from someone you vaguely know.
And also there’s the fact that
I'm not going to be rude to somebody who's in my extended family.
Through JJ, she was introduced to his brother Bobby,
and Bobby and Kirat started this friendship.
Bobby contacted me to thank me
for being a big sister figure to his younger brother
and to tell me how big a role I played in his life.
Which, for me, was a bit overwhelming
because I just thought he was
just somebody online who’s dating my cousin.
You know, just kind of a polite person.
So after Bobby and Kirat start speaking together on Facebook,
for a while, it’s all really normal.
They talk once every couple of weeks.
So Facebook at the time was very different to how we know it now.
He used to send messages like a pen pal almost.
They’d be great big, long messages.
It wasn’t like instant messaging like you expect it to be now.
They tell each other about their situations, their families.
So it was quite gradual.
And he would talk about things and say how happy he was.
He’d got a kid on the way. He was a cardiologist.
Bobby and I were from a South Asian community that lived in Kenya.
That community is really close-knit.
Bobby was slowly establishing a friendship with me,
an online friendship.
Catfishing is when someone creates a fake online persona
to try and lure someone into a relationship or a friendship
to trick them, basically.
So at some point, a few months into Kirat and Bobby’s friendship,
something really weird happens,
which, if it had gone slightly differently,
could have meant that the whole scam fell apart.
I was at a hen weekend in Brighton.
And on Saturday night, at about 2 o’clock in the morning in a club,
she sees Bobby on the other side of the room.
And she goes up to him, and she says,
“Hey, Bobby, it’s Kirat. How you doing?”
He acknowledged me, but he was-- he looked really confused.
And it was kind of like 1:30, 2 o’clock, maybe.
And she thinks, “OK, Bobby’s just drunk.
I’ll just leave it. I’ll forget about it.”
And she goes back to her group of friends.
It was a strange moment,
but it was like, you know, he exists,
and he acknowledged it was him,
and I let it go.
If it had been three hours earlier,
if it had been a meeting in a cafe
where they could have had a proper conversation,
it wouldn’t have taken much for the whole scam to have fallen apart.
But something then happens that’s completely shocking.
Bobby has family in Kenya,
and when he’s visiting them,
he’s shot.
And it’s really serious, and he goes into hospital,
and eventually... he dies.
And my cousin was actually there at the time,
and she was reporting things back to me as well.
Every South Asian person from Kenya
will have had somebody in their family
that’s been affected by something like that.
And at this point, Kirat doesn’t really know what to think
because she’s still not that close to him.
But what is totally shocking is that a few months later--
My cousin phoned me at work...
to tell me that Bobby’s alive.
That he's in witness protection.
What do you say when somebody says to you someone’s come back to life?
So for the next year or so,
we have this strange situation where Bobby is in hospital in New York
and in various other places.
He's really constricted in what he can say and who he can call
because he’s in this witness protection program.
Over this period of time, he and Kirat become closer.
And Bobby's condition isn't good.
He’s suffering from strokes and blood clots
and various other medical ailments.
He’s kind of on death’s door,
and Kirat feels like she can be a support to him.
There were times when he’d had a serious operation,
or he’d had a stroke, or something had happened.
Kirat wasn’t just speaking to Bobby.
She was speaking to his medical consultant,
to his friend, to his ex-wife,
to a whole bunch of other people who were all confirming
and supporting what Bobby was telling Kirat.
It was a kind of confirmation loop.
Around that point was when he told me he was in love with me.
I had people talking at me like, “He really is in love with you.
I think he’s always been in love with you.”
And my cousin would be like, “Yeah, it makes so much sense.”
Bobby and Kirat entered into a romantic relationship,
I think, on Valentine’s Day in 2015.
I knew he wasn't going to live long.
I’d already been told he’s not going to last beyond July that year.
So for me, it was just about making his final months comfortable.
This is somebody who respects me, treats me really well.
And at that point in the relationship,
Bobby was living in the US,
and so it was a long-distance relationship.
They would speak to each other for hours over Skype.
They would even fall asleep to each other over Skype.
One of the convenient things about Bobby’s medical problems
was that in one of his operations, his vocal cords were damaged.
It was the case, so he couldn’t speak.
Bobby would be typing his thoughts,
and Kirat would be sending little audio notes to him.
Love you.
I missed you so much today, Sweets.
So much.
I really hope you’re not too down.
And on top of that, the fact that he was under witness protection
allowed the catfisher to convince Kirat
that there were even more restrictions
on how he was able to communicate.
People questioned me, “Why didn’t you do a video call?”
We weren’t allowed to. We weren’t even allowed to.
I could share photos of me with him,
but he wasn't allowed to have photos of himself.
The relationship started off well, but as it progressed,
Bobby became increasingly controlling.
Literally, like, challenge.
Just like, “I’m going to kill myself. What are you going to do?”
It was literally like that.
He always needed that reassurance.
It must have taken up hours of her life.
It must have taken over her life.
If I put my head back in that time,
definitely, I wasn’t me.
And I’d say it to him,
“I’m not myself. I don’t recognize myself as a person.”
Coercive control is when someone uses threats
or maybe manipulation to isolate a victim
and to gain control over them.
He was using illness as a way of manipulating her.
He had a massive stroke while he was talking to me.
That was the first of many.
It was like the responsibility for Bobby’s life was in my hands.
I'd wanted to leave the relationship so many times.
It was just so messy.
I would manage to have my day at work.
Then as soon as I'd get home,
the pings used to come in quite regularly.
Kirat became increasingly isolated. She lost weight. She lost friends.
She had to quit her job because of the stress.
During this time period, when Bobby was in hospital,
Kirat became closer and closer to her younger cousin Simran.
Simran actually went on a couple of work trips to New York,
where she saw Bobby.
My own cousin was the only person that was really talking to me.
I was an absolute wreck by this time.
I lost track of the number of times he said he was coming to the UK,
and I'd get ready for him to come.
He was making out like he was holding on just to see me,
just to see me that once.
And he’d be like, “I just want to die with you next to me.”
This time next week. In a week, you could be here.
Wow.
Still deciding what I should be wearing to pick you up.
I’m so excited.
And every time, he had an excuse about why they couldn’t meet.
Broken my heart.
Broken-- shattered my dreams.
I thought you loved me.
I love you, but I can’t do this.
I can’t be pushed aside while you think--
when I’m supposed to be a part of your life.
She was telling her family that she was going to see Bobby every day.
And then she was just driving around and around
and sitting in a car on her own
because she couldn’t face telling her family the truth,
that Bobby still wouldn’t let her see him.
I used to often go for drives to calm me down,
have my hands on the steering wheel so I couldn’t text back
because he was always picking fights with me.
He was constantly picking fights with me.
In 2018, she hired a private investigator.
And he came back,
and he gave her an address in Brighton.
So one day, Kirat has another fight with Bobby.
And I just went for a drive.
And I got to the M25.
And then she sees signs towards Brighton.
Do I go home?
And I just thought,
“Screw it, let’s go.”
And she went to his house, and she knocked on the door.
When he eventually opened the door,
his wife or ex-wife came out with his son,
who I treated as my stepson.
And that’s the start of how the scam started to collapse.
At that point, my world had come falling apart.
Going to the Brighton house, I recognized...
where some of those photos had been taken of him.
So, you know, he’s been lying to me.
She thought that she’d caught him out in a lie.
His wife was like, “Go and speak to her.”
And...
he was like, “My sister’s inside.”
I’m like, ”Yeah, it’s your sister.”
I knew her, too, you know?
It was just like...
At that moment, Kirat is seeing someone
that she’s spent the last eight years in a friendship
and then a relationship with.
And Bobby is looking at
someone who he’s never seen before in his life.
I literally went out to the pavement. I was heaving. I was like...
wretching.
It was just... what do you do?
You’re terrified, and I thought, “I want to speak to him by myself.”
And he wouldn't speak to me.
Kirat is confused and distraught and doesn’t know what’s going on.
So Kirat drives back to London,
and I think that she can hardly see the road
because she’s crying so much.
And she’s speaking to Simran on the phone all the time,
trying to work out what’s happened.
That was the end of that relationship, regardless.
I didn’t know what was coming a couple of days later.
She took it to the police, and she filed a report with them.
And at that stage, she was in touch with her cousin Simran,
who had been with her for this whole story.
They’d been close. They’d been talking about Bobby.
And at that stage, she found out that, actually,
some of the details that Simran had given her were lies.
That Simran had said she’d met Bobby, and in fact, that wasn’t true.
And she told me she didn’t see him in New York
because that’s what he’d told her to say.
So I was angry with her.
And then the next day, it all comes crashing down.
Kirat is upstairs in her bedroom,
and she sees Simran come up in a car.
Simran’s wearing these tracksuit bottoms.
She looks like she hasn't slept.
And there’s something in Kirat’s mind that finds that weird.
When she came,
she confessed to it all being her.
Why would you?
Like...
she’s your baby sister.
I called her my baby sister.
You know, you wouldn’t even imagine somebody would go that far.
It was Simran all along.
She had been Bobby.
She had been all the different characters.
And for over a decade, she had been pretending to be this person online
and creating a false relationship with her cousin.
What Kirat told me was that
she didn’t really express much emotion when she was doing so.
She didn’t say sorry.
She wasn’t crying.
She didn't seem to be particularly upset.
When you think about a typical catfisher,
you tend to think of someone that’s kind of lonely.
But with Simran, she didn’t fit any of that profile.
She was a high-flier. She was head girl at her school.
She had a great job in a great firm in the City.
On the outside, there wasn't any reason why she would have done this.
And that’s what makes this whole story so odd.
I wasn’t online looking for love at all.
I was quite a busy, mind my own business kind of person.
And people need to understand if you're targeted,
you’ve just got no hope,
especially if it’s someone that you trust.
So...
After Kirat found out that her cousin was the perpetrator of this,
she went back to the police,
and she again tried to get an investigation going.
She tried to get some kind of accountability.
And really, the police did nothing.
She was the one that had to go to the police
to make all the efforts to try and get accountability,
whereas Simran seemed to have moved on.
She got a promotion at her work. She was going on holiday.
Kirat was still in a really bad place,
and Simran seemed to have got away with it.
They didn’t get it. They told me I wasn’t the victim.
The real Bobby was.
The real Bobby didn’t have a clue what was going on.
I think it's really shocking that she was ignored,
that she wasn’t taken seriously, and it was dismissed.
Even though catfishing isn’t a standalone criminal offense,
what Simran did to Kirat was arguably a crime.
Why had the police taken no interest in Kirat’s case?
I just can’t understand how people don’t see this as a crime.
There were so many things...
that were wrong.
So Kirat’s story isn’t over.
She's talking to the police at the moment,
and that might end up in the investigation into Simran
being reopened.
I think this is a really good example
of legislation being behind social media.
When you change perceptions in society,
the police and the law needs to catch up
with what’s going on on the internet.
Developments in the way we interact
and the way we behave towards one another,
it changes at such a fast rate.
Why are people asking, “Well, what was wrong with you?”
There was nothing wrong with me. What was wrong with the perpetrator?
I hope it never happens to you.
I hope it never happens to anyone that you love.