By "updated successfully" I guess you mean "without error" rather than "did the value actually change".
Mongo has the concept of a "write concern". The traditional default has been UNACKNOWLEDGED (a.k.a "normal"). This concern level was happy if the network was working.
The next step up from that is ACKNOWLEDGED (a.k.a. "safe"). This level gives Mongo the chance to respond with an error. The Mongo docs describe it as: "With this level of write concern, clients can catch network, duplicate key, and other exceptions."
If you're using a recent Lift 2.5 (e.g., RC6) you could try and replace ...
new Mongo(...)
with...
new MongoClient(....)
...and that could, plausibly, default to updates called with the ACKNOWLEDGED write concern.
Alternatives:
The save method can take a write concern argument.
If you're using Rogue, the updateOne call takes a write concern argument.
Hope that's some help
Richard