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It’s a catfishing tale that seems unbelievable, but it’s not.
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Two years after true crime fans were riveted by a podcast recounting a catfish story that saw a woman in a nine-year relationship without having met or video-called the man who went on to be her “boyfriend,” the crazy tale is coming to Netflix.
Kirat Assi, 43, of London, U.K., spent the bulk of a decade believing she was communicating online with a doctor named Bobby Jandu.
Their relationship started as a friendship before blossoming into something more.
According to the U.K. Daily Maiil, the “couple” would speak on the phone almost daily and at times their chats would become sexual in nature. There were other twists, too, including Jandu allegedly being shot, placed in the Witness Protection Program and suffering a brain tumour.
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He eventually became obsessive and controlling, according to reports, leaving Assi suffering from chest pains and taking a leave from work due to stress.
Not everything was as it seemed, however. Jandu’s profile, and some 50 others in the fake network of his “friends,” was actually being managed by Assi’s female cousin, Simran Bhogal.
“What happened to me is just one crazy story,” Assi said in the trailer for the upcoming Netflix program, which will be out on Oct. 16.
“You can’t make it up. We’re talking about 10 years of my life.”
Assi believed her boyfriend was living in Australia, but it all unravelled when she was driven to hire a private detective, leading to the truth.
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It’s believed to be one of the longest-running and most complex cases of catfishing.
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In 2009, Assi was working as an arts and events assistant and was in a relationship when, out of the blue, she received a Facebook message seemingly from her cousin’s ex-boyfriend, JJ, asking for guidance on how to get her back.
The pair became friends and chatted for the next five months before she heard that JJ had died. That’s when her cousin passed on the email address of his brother, Jandu, to send her condolences.
The fake profile used the real Jandu’s photos and biographical details without his consent and in November 2010, Assi had her first encounter with the fake Facebook profile.
A friendship developed, but he told her he was married with a child on the way. However, he soon shared details of his collapsing relationship.
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“We weren’t close, but I saw him as a friend, a little brother,” she told the Daily Mail in 2021.
She received a Facebook message in November 2013 saying Jandu had been shot and was in a coma, suffering memory loss. In January 2014, she learned that he had died.
“I was invited to join a Facebook group of his friends. There were 39 people in it. I have since learned that none of them were real,” she said.
Soon after, however, she received an email saying that he was alive but faked his own death and was hiding in the witness protection program.
“Ridiculous” she said. “But at every step, these mad happenings were being backed up by other people.”
In 2015, she was told he had suffered a brain tumour, followed by a stroke.
A few years later, she finally hired a private detective and learned it was all an elaborate catfishing effort by her cousin.
“She has taken 10 years of my life from me, years I will not get back,” Assi said. “In that time, I could have met someone real, had a baby. I lost my friends, my job, my savings.”
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