The Sweet Bobby podcasters enter the scene after this civil resolution. Kirat was awarded damages for misuse of private information, harassment and infringement of personal data rights, and received a written apology from Simran. In 2020, Yair Cohen, a specialist in the emerging field of social media law, took up Kirat’s case and made a successful civil claim, the first of its kind in relation to catfishing in the UK. Heartbalm actions are uncommon these days, with most abolished by statute (England got rid of them in 1970), but other avenues are open to victims of catfishing in the civil courts. At the turn of the 20th century, there were many more civil actions available to people who had been intimately deceived, like the ‘heartbalm’ torts which provided financial compensation for broken hearts. She reveals the US legal system’s bias against claims of deceit that involve an intimate partner, as opposed to a stranger. In Intimate Lies and the Law (2019), Jill Hasday examines a range of deceptions carried out by lovers or relatives. But many online deceptions are now conducted by friends, acquaintances or relatives, as with Simran and Kirat. The catfish who contacted Schulman in 2007 was a total stranger, operating a family of fake profiles miles away. What makes victims – Schulman calls them ‘hopefuls’ – keep believing? Do catfish offer the promise of a meaningful relationship that isn’t available in real life? The Tinder swindler Simon Leviev, posing as a diamond mogul, was constantly fleeing his ‘enemies’. Bobby claimed to have been shot in Kenya, presumed dead he told Kirat he was part of a witness protection programme. People on the hook often fall for the same improbable stories. In some cases, a fake online identity seems to offer a form of wish-fulfilment, for catfish and victim alike.
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While many ‘Tinder swindlers’ (as a recent Netflix series called them) plainly commit fraud, the motives of a lot of catfish are far more ambiguous. The Police Complaints Board later found that Simran’s alleged behaviour, ‘while morally objectionable, does not violate legal statutes’. She had trapped her in an imaginary world. But Simran had not offended or defrauded Kirat. (Unlike in France, where it was criminalised in 2011.)įor catfishing to be prosecuted – the term comes from Nev Schulman’s documentary Catfish (2010) – the impersonation has to be bound up with obscene messaging or plans for financial gain. 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.