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. She fell in love with a man she met online named Bobby, a cardiologist living in New York, part of her wider Sikh community. After a serious accident in 2014, Bobby made Kirat his lifeline, and began to exert strict control over her life in London. 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. (There was a real Bobby, too, who lived in Brighton and had no idea his images were being repurposed.)
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