Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hello, it's Basha Cummings here. I'm an editor at Tortoise, which is the home of Sweet Bobby, Hoaxed and many more award-winning investigative podcasts. I'm here to tell you about Tortoise Investigates, where we curate the best of our chart-topping investigations in one place. Everything from extraordinary tales of deception to a suspicious killing to one mother's decades-long fight with the police. Just search for Tortoise Investigates wherever you get your podcasts.
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Hello, it's Basha here. Sweet Bobby is the first series in our Tortoise Investigates feed. It was reported by my colleague Alexi Mostras and it was his first big investigation here at Tortoise and it shot to number one in the charts both here in the UK and in the US.
And there's a reason for that. I worked on this series with Alexei, so I know the story well, but even now I find it truly fascinating and totally compelling. It's a wild journey into one of the most sophisticated catfishing operations that we've ever come across, with a very human story at the heart of it. This statement is as best as I can remember, given that all the communication was constant and bombarding. This story, the one that you're about to hear...
It's a love story. I meant it from the bottom of my heart. It's a screwed up, crazy kind of love story, filled with death, lies and witness protection programmes. But still, it's a love story. Until it isn't. This is killing me. When all conversations are aligned by date, you can also see how consuming the bombardment was. Matters were somehow always urgent, sensitive or too serious. Much ghosting and gaslighting taking place.
This story starts 11 years ago, way back in 2010. But for me, I only got to hear about it recently. I'm an investigative reporter, and this summer I was working on a story about online porn. I'd arranged to meet a source for lunch. We meet at a restaurant just off Oxford Street. He had some files that he wanted to show me. I remember it was early June. London was just coming out of lockdown. There was a buzz in the air. The source and I, we sit down and order tapas. And he shows me the information, and it's good.
But it was right at the end, when we were having coffee, that something else happened. The source hands me a document, a witness statement. Nothing to do with porn. The events in this account are simply the general gist of events over a period of a decade, but things were happening practically daily. And as he passes it across the table, he leans in and he says something like, this is the craziest case I've ever seen. And you know what? He was right.
In more than 15 years of journalism covering everything from tax avoidance to terrorism, I've never seen anything like it. Again, the pressure on me was constant. My freedom and independence became less and less, while the power and control over me became increasingly constant and intense. This is the story of a woman called Kirat and a man called Bobby. And it's about how Bobby manipulated Kirat over 10 years.
He destroyed her career. What can I do to help you see your heart? Her friendships. She went from being a vibrant person to being a shadow of herself. Her chance to have a family. Why didn't you stop? And almost her life. You could have stopped, but you chose not to. Why? This may have started out as a love story, but it ends up as something much darker. I'm Alexi Mostris, and from Tortoise Media, you're listening to Sweet Bobby. Episode 1, Sliding Doors.
This is Desi Radio on 1602 AM and satellite channel 0169. It's the Ponga Roadshow with myself, Kira, keeping you company. I say all the way till six, there's not that long to go, especially when you're having fun. Kira Asi, she's a presenter on her local community radio station, Desi Radio.
Hello, Desi Radio. She's on every Thursday from two to six. Oh, it's a dad's birthday. What's his name? There's a lot going on, but as you can hear, Kirat is a total pro. OK, I'll definitely get one on for him. Kirat's full name is Hurkirat Kaur Asi, but everyone calls her Kirat. You just don't know where the time goes when you're doing it. You're occupied. You can't think about anything else. You don't have time.
And I think radio is an obvious choice for Kirat. She's a natural talker. In fact, the first time I met her, our meeting lasted eight hours straight. By 2010, Kirat had been on Desi Radio for a few years. She was 30 years old and she had a busy life. I had so much...
I'm not saying my life was all fun and games. There were difficult things, as anyone does have in their life. But yeah, you know, prospects. There were prospects and I was looking forward to it. There was so much to be explored. I could see my roadmap then, which is in stark contrast to now.
Kira and I were basically the same age. And I remember being 30, old enough to know what I wanted, but young enough not to care that much. And it was the same with her. She was happy with her job, thinking about starting a family, but having fun too.
There used to be a regular night called Bombo Bronx. It used to be once a month and all of us would kind of get together. No matter where we were, what we were doing, we'd all end up there. You know, that was a standard. You go there, you chill out, have a laugh. No, come back four or five o'clock in the morning, still get up in the morning to go to the office at eight o'clock in the morning. That was a standard. Lots of nights like that.
That's not to say that life was all plain sailing. It wasn't. Kirat's parents weren't getting along that well. An uncle she had been close to had become ill. And Kirat's main job in events, that was quite stressful. But it wasn't anything she couldn't handle. And then, in November 2010, she gets a message on Facebook. Hey, Hakirat. Hope you're well. It's JJ's brother. Hope you got the message from Simram regarding a note that he had written?
He'd always put in a good word for you. You got his better side. Looked up to you as a big sister, as he told us. Kind regards, Bobby. Kirat wasn't expecting it, but it wasn't totally random either. Kirat had a second cousin called Simran. She was about 17 at this point, more than a decade younger than Kirat. Simran was dating a guy called JJ, who was the same age in his teens.
In college, Simran and JJ broke up. And JJ reached out to Keira for advice on Facebook, kind of treating her like a big sister, asking her how could he win Simran back. So JJ, the 17-year-old, and Keira started messaging each other, a few messages a week. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, in August 2010, JJ dies. He just drops dead one day, apparently from some sort of allergic reaction.
Keira didn't know how to react. I mean, it was shocking news, but she barely knew him. And it's not like there was much she could do. So she got on with her life. And it was about a month after that, that Bobby, JJ's brother, messages her. He'd contacted me to say, you know, thank you for being so kind to my brother and all that kind of thing and gave my condolences, ended up speaking to the brother.
Kirat hadn't met Bobby at this point, but she'd heard his name before. They come from the same community. Kirat and most of the other characters in this story, they're Sikhs. And the Sikh community in the UK is extremely close. Everyone knows of each other and news spreads like wildfire in our community. There was another important connection between Bobby and Kirat. So and then we've got the whole Kenya community, two degrees of separation.
I'm kind of ashamed that I didn't know this before, but in the last 150 years or so, a lot of Indians have migrated to Kenya, and many British Sikhs today still have close links to Kenya, and their families still have close links to each other. So when Bobby messaged Kirat on Facebook, Kirat knew of him vaguely through the Sikh community and through friends and family in Kenya. This was just someone she instinctively trusted.
Plus, she could see from his Facebook page that he'd been to some of the same events she'd been at, and that he was already friends with some of her cousins. So far, so very normal. Except, it wasn't normal. And now, I'm going to do something you don't really do in a psychological thriller, which, if this was a film, it definitely would be. I'm going to give you a spoiler. Trusting Bobby back then was understandable, normal, unremarkable. He was just a friend of a friend on Facebook.
But for Kirat, it turned out to be a life-changing mistake. You may have guessed already, but Bobby isn't who he says he is. Bobby was a character, one at the centre of a sophisticated catfishing operation, which means someone was pretending to be Bobby online, stealing his identity and deliberately drawing Kirat into a web of lies. And every expert, lawyer and criminologist I've shown this case to, well, it's blown their minds.
Oh my God, where to start? What the hell has been going on? It's truly remarkable. I'm going to tell you the whole story of how and why this happened. But for now, you need to know how it all started. All Keira had in front of her at this moment in 2010 were a few Facebook messages.
From Bobby, a handsome cardiologist, friends with some of her friends, who was a few years younger than she was, talking to her sweetly about his baby brother. He was the good big brother who did everything right. It was, you know, like, you know, oh, he's the goody-goody, he's married and he can't do anything wrong. You know, he's always doing the right thing by the family. But over time, the conversation started to change. He started talking to me more regularly and more.
Things were going wrong in his life. He was confiding in me. Sorry to disturb you. I just needed help and thought of you first. They began messaging more and more. Their friendship became a little closer. What can you do? You'd be kind to somebody, right? He's just lost his brother. I didn't have any reason to question it.
And Kirat learned a few more things about Bobby.
They'd learnt that his wife was expecting a baby. He was super, super happy. He was working in a hospital at the time and down times he'd message me on Facebook. We had conversations about what he wanted to call the baby if it was a boy or a girl and I did find it a bit strange that he was talking to me about it because it's something he should be talking to his wife about.
How many times a day were you speaking to him at this point or a week? I mean, we weren't talking every day. It was just whenever he approached me, so to speak. And the thing is, it wasn't like a Facebook messenger situation necessarily. So there'd be like a long message from him. Then there'd be a long response from me, almost like you were pen pals almost. So it's not instant communication like you think of it right now.
I've read and listened to thousands of messages between Kirat and Bobby, literally hours of my life I've spent in their world. And something that's interesting to me at this point is that Kirat wasn't being bombarded with messages from Bobby, not at this early stage at least. Bobby's approach was way more subtle than that. Again, you know, I never felt the need to ask for a phone number or anything like that. I didn't know where he lived. I didn't know anything, to be honest. And I wasn't curious either because...
I didn't really need to know. You know, I had my own life going on here. So I was just being a shoulder to cry on. Over the months, Bobby revealed that his happy family life was imploding. He separated from his wife, argued with his family, and it was all taking its toll. Everything is just becoming all too much. Work, too. Just taking time off, made a few decisions.
As Bobby shared so openly with her, Kirat started to open up about her own life, intimate stuff, about her on-off partner and how he was being difficult. Now, I've noticed that whenever I tell Kirat's story to anyone, my wife, my friends, there's a divide.
Many people over the age of 40 struggle to see how she could become so close to someone she'd never met. But anyone younger, they get it. If you've grown up in an online world, it's obvious that online relationships can be as close as any other. Think about starting a conversation with a stranger in real life. You're working with really limited data. But if you chat to someone online, you've got a wealth of information at your fingertips. Their politics, their age, how they behave.
And you can leverage that to become very close to someone very quickly, which is cool, but it's open to manipulation too. So I'm Harvey. I met Kirat for the first time when I started school at seven years old. And I've known her since. So we've known each other for about 35 years now. So I guess you could say she started off as a school friend. Then she became a family friend. And now she's more like a sister to me.
Kirat's best friend Harvey was there from the beginning. She started hearing about this new friend, Bobby, and was instinctively concerned. Can you remember the first time that she mentioned him? Yeah, it was quite weird because I thought even when he was her friend that she would talk to, it was a weird relationship. Bobby had just left his wife. His life was a mess. Was this really what Kirat needed right now? But Harvey also knew something else about her friend.
Kirat was the sort of person to go above and beyond, to help anyone that asked for it, which made her vulnerable. Again, this is Kirat all over. If she feels people need her, she will be there 100%. And that's what it was. It was like she really felt like they needed her. So she was there. She would help anyone in need. So even if she hadn't met these people physically, she felt needed and she did as best as she could.
Harvey was worried about where this was going, and it turns out she was right to be. Why? Why do you want to do that to me? Why are you so adamant on hurting me?
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Would things be different if you caught the train? It's a 1990s classic starring Gwyneth Paltrow. And it's a film about a single moment, really. What life would have been like if things had gone a little differently. I had just caught that train. It had been home ages ago. The film opens with Helen, the main character, rushing to catch a train home. But she's a second too late. She misses it. That's version one. And then the film rewinds. And this time, in version two, Helen does make the train.
So she's home just in time to catch her boyfriend cheating on her. The film is about how a split second can change everything. Obviously, real life doesn't work like that. Except for Keira, it sort of did. Her sliding doors moment came in the spring of 2011. A moment when she brushed right up against the truth, but didn't quite grasp it hard enough. It was about five months after she started talking to Bobby, on her best friend Harvey's hen night. The child's alright
They left London and had gone down to the seaside in Brighton for a night on the town. So we went out and, yeah, it was a really cheesy club called Lola's and I think it was a Hawaiian-themed, like, palm trees, Hawaiian shirt kind of club. It was a bit of a dive. Sticky floors, low ceilings, lots of noise. Still, the girls didn't care. They were there to have fun.
I think that was the idea. It was supposed to be a themed night and everyone had a few, had a good laugh, sang along to all the songs. I'm usually the responsible one, so there were a couple of others that didn't drink either, so we were the responsible crew looking after the very drunk crew. I can picture them in this club, dancing, drinking tequila shots. But then this typical Brighton hen night takes an unexpected turn, quite a sinister turn given all that we know.
Well into the night, I think it's probably about 1, 1.30 maybe, I remember speaking to the girls, I think I was speaking to Harvey and one of the others, and suddenly a big girl walks past. And it's quite unusual, a guy in a turban stands out a mile, that's the whole point of wearing a turban, and it was Bobby.
It was really Bobby. And I was like really shocked. I remember turning around to Harvey, who was the hen and probably not in the best state of mind at that time. I remember saying, oh my God, Harvey, it's Bobby. I can't believe it. And with him was someone else, his friend. They're walking past and they went to Ray's part of the club. And I just went, I'm going to go and say hello. And I followed them. I was like, Bobby. And he answered. He was like, yeah, hi, kind of thing. And then, um,
He wasn't necessarily friendly, but he wasn't unfriendly. He was just like, acknowledged me. And I was talking to him and it was loud. It was a club with people a bit happy and leery and it was just noisy. And I was trying to have a conversation with him. I was trying to explain to him, it's me, Kirit, her Kirit.
And he was just looking at me like I was recently. He was like, I don't know. I don't remember. And I didn't want to embarrass him. And I thought, maybe he's had a few too many to drink because he looked a bit kind of spaced out. He was quite serious. He wasn't like panicked or anything. He was just like, I don't know. And I was like, OK. And because he's always been so respectful, I didn't want to embarrass him. And I went, it's OK. Don't worry. And I walked back. I was just like, wow, what's he doing here? I didn't know he lived in Brighton.
It was a mad coincidence, and it makes me feel a bit sick, because I know what's coming. And I want to go back in time and shout at her, he isn't who you think he is. Because at this point, Bobby and Kirat were just online friends. They'd only been messaging for a few months. No real damage had been done. And I'm thinking, if only the club had been a bit quieter, or they'd met a few hours earlier, Kirat could have worked out the truth.
And maybe she could have saved herself from more than a decade of pain. But that didn't happen. Kirat pushed her way back through the crowd and rejoined her hen party. Bobby was drunk, she was thinking. I'm not going to embarrass him. Still, I find it a bit weird that she didn't press Bobby harder that night. After all, this is a guy that's been messaging you for five months or so and then acts like he doesn't know you. But there was another reason that Kirat was ready to let it slide.
Bobby wasn't the only person she was talking to. There were other people who Kirat knew, who said they also knew Bobby, who backed up what he was saying. People she had no reason to doubt. Thinking back on that night now, I do think that I should question things more. If I just pushed him and said, come on, it's me and made him talk to me, I might not have had to go through the last 10, 13 years that I have.
It could have been so different. But what do you do at one o'clock in the morning in the middle of a club? That's not quite the end of episode one. There's something else I need to tell you. After Brighton, Bobby distanced himself from Kirat. He moved to Australia and got engaged to a new partner. Kirat was invited to his wedding in Kenya. She couldn't make it, but she saw pictures of the ceremony on Facebook. Meanwhile, she got on with her life.
She took a job at St Mary's University in London, organising events. She helped out on the London Olympics in 2012. And then, in November 2013, two years after she met Bobby in Brighton, she was doing her radio show and something caught her eye. Because I used to take messages from callers on Facebook, I used to have all the screens open. And in the feed while I was there, it appeared in the feed that Bobby had been shot.
Bobby had been shot, or at least that's what it said on Facebook.
Over the next few weeks, she followed posts that said he was in and out of a coma. Kirat felt totally helpless, stuck in another country. But one of Bobby's friends kept her updated. So did Bobby's new wife. So did Kirat's cousin, Simran, who happened to be in Kenya at the time. For weeks, Kirat was on tenterhooks, waiting for information, waiting to find out if he was okay. And then Bobby woke up. I remember that you used to be my brother's friend.
He had told me lots about you. Please help where you can. Feels as though I've just lost a great relationship. That was one of the first messages Bobby sent Kirat after he came out of the coma. He said he'd lost his memory, or at least part of it. But a few weeks after he woke up, Bobby's condition began to deteriorate. I have a massive headache again. Just waiting for yet more scan results. Definitely something not right if morphine can't keep the pain away.
He'd gone back into a coma, basically, after he'd had a headache and they'd taken him back in. And I'd been the last person to speak to him, like, message him, have communication with him. So we knew that. And then I remember I got sick that day. I think I had food poisoning that day and my partner had picked me up and taken me to his. I'd been sort of not feeling very well. I think I was asleep. And when we got the message that Bobby had passed away... For Keira, it was pretty devastating.
But for me, I'm thinking, this is really weird. If Bobby is at the centre of a catfishing operation, the character at the heart of it all, why did the person pulling the strings kill him off? Bobby was the main link into Kirat. Without Bobby, how would the catfish work? How did you get the message? On Messenger. And it came in a group as well. And the group had loads of people involved.
There were 39 of us in the group, so I didn't know lots of those people. Or I knew of them, some of them, the cousins. So you were added to a Facebook group with 39 people? Yeah, there were 39 people in that group. I remember this conversation with Kirat, and not just because I was puzzled about Bobby's death. It was that number at the end. The Facebook group, which was set up for Bobby, had 39 people.
all of them grieving and posting condolences, all with different accounts. If Bobby didn't exist, were all of these people being scammed too? Why would anyone try and deceive that many people? But then I caught myself. I was being naive, naive to the complexity of the deception. What if all of those people were fake too?
It's quite feasible that a single person built this narrative in the same way that we look at legitimate fiction. People build wonderful interleaved, wonderful universes. My name's Dr Chris Hand. I'm a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Glasgow.
I mean, when I first came across this case, it was like an epic. You know, it was like something like war and peace with this massive cast of characters. And what was compelling to me was how an individual would be able to create this world by drawing on reality. And I think these cases are so compelling because they often do.
just pull in enough from what's happening in real world with real people to again just give it that flavour of authenticity. Over the next five episodes, I'm going to tell you the whole story. What I think is likely to be the most sophisticated catfishing scam ever perpetrated. But the story isn't finished. Even today, Kirat has no idea why this happened to her. So I'm going to try and get her some answers.
I'm going to hunt for the person who did this to her and finally ask them the questions Kirat has been haunted by. I don't know yet where this will all end up, but it matters. There might be other victims. Next time on Sweet Bobby, the deception becomes more elaborate, more sophisticated, and I try and find out more about Bobby himself. What's real and what's fake? Was he just an innocent player in all this? Oh, and one more thing.
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