Might catfishing be our next true crime obsession? As cold case murders were to the past half-decade, might online swindlers who leverage romantic intrigue to commit cruel, emotionally and financially costly cons against besotted victims – “catfishers” – prove the most compelling subject for podcasts and documentaries and audiobooks and quasi-fictionalised ITV reconstructions in the emerging-from-Covid era?
Maybe. If 2021 ended – culturally speaking – with breathless talk of Tortoise Media’s Sweet Bobby podcast, a compelling investigation into the extraordinarily involved, decade-long deception of British woman Kirat Assi by the most unlikely of online villains, then 2022 certainly kicks off with Netflix’s The Tinder Swindler, a 114-minute documentary detailing the life, cons, cruelty, downfall and putative rise from the ashes of fake international playboy
