Netflix Documentary Depicts Nightmare of Catfishing
The Netflix documentary Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare is a frightening depiction of how easy it is to become a victim of catfishing and how vulnerable many people are. Catfishing is when someone creates a fictitious online persona or fake identity to lure another person into a relationship. Romance scams often involve catfishing and leave victims with broken hearts and depleted bank accounts.
But financial gain is not always the motive for catfishing, as Sweet Bobby illustrates. The documentary portrays the decade-long scheme that lured Kirat Assi, a Punjabi woman in Britain, into a relationship with a doctor named Bobby Jandu. It began as an online friendship, then progressed into a romance and eventually an engagement. The perpetrator convinced Assi that the man of her dreams couldn’t meet her in person because he was in a witness protection program in the U.S.
The perpetrator’s motive isn’t clear, but it appears to be manipulation or control. Indeed, some people engage in catfishing in order to harass other people, bully them or take revenge on them. Some suffer from low selfesteem or loneliness and enjoy being a totally different person online. A man suffering from low self-esteem may portray himself as super-attractive, using a photo he found online, while a woman suffering from low selfesteem may scream, “Oh my God. Ranveer Singh’s twin brother has sent me a friend request!”
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Compiled and partly written by Indian humorist MELVIN DURAI, author of the novel Bala Takes the Plunge.
[Comments? Contributions? We would love to hear from you about Chai Time. If you have contributions, please email us at melvin@melvindurai.com. We welcome jokes, quotes, online clips, and more.]
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