Tinder Swindler: The love con
‘What happened to me felt like a movie,’ says 29-year-old Norweigian Cecilie Fjellhoy, who lives in London has been on Tinder, the dating app for seven years. During this time, she says she’s had 1,024 matches and calls herself an ‘expert’ at using the app.
A few years ago, Cecilie matched with a man who seemed to appear according to her, have very similar interests to her. He worked hard, he liked to socialise and he seemed to always be travelling.
Soon after they matched, Simon asks to meet her for coffee. He was leaving London the next day and was only available to meet today. But this is no ordinary coffee. Simon is staying at the five-star hotel Four Seasons and asks to meet her there.
“He has this magnetism. There’s something about this guy that is special.” – These are Cecilie’s first thoughts when she meets Simon.
“One of the first topics that we talked about was his job,” she further adds. “Very quickly, he became very personal and that’s what I liked about him.” Simon tells her about his baby daughter and he shares that since he’s travelling a lot for ‘work’ he isn’t able to spend enough time with her.
He tells Cecilie that he is the CEO of LLD Diamonds, the Leviev Group of Companies. He tells her that he’s the son of Lev Leviev, the Uzbeki-born Israeli citizen, who is known as the ‘King of Diamonds’ and whose wealth was last estimated by Forbes be a bit under $1 billion in 2020. From there, he starts calling himself the ‘prince of diamonds’ and this is how he starts to feed into the ‘prince charming’ fantasy that most women have.
Right at the onset of the documentary, Cecilie speaks about the talks about the trials and tribulations of modern-day dating. How in today’s fast-paced world, it’s no longer possible to meet people organically. She speaks about how every girl grows up watch Disney movies and dreams of meeting her prince charming. Now interestingly enough the movie she mentions here is Beauty and the Beast, which on the surface, it’s a children’s movie about a young girl who loves to read and dreams about adventure. She meets her prince aka ‘the beast’ and ‘saves’ him.
At this point in the documentary, the cuts to montages from the Disney movie itself. It is very note-worthy that this is the Disney movie Cecilie speaks of and that the documentary makers choose to show this part of her interview while setting the stage for the documentary. The children’s tale, Beauty and the Beast has long been criticised for its warped representation of love where often the Stockholm syndrome style gratitude shown by Belle in the movie has been glorified as romantic love.
This is also one of the many times in the movie Simon is compared to a prince: “a prince coming to save you”. It’s almost as if the documentary wants to send the message that this this is the illusion created by Disney, a damaging and likewise, deceiving concept of what love should look like.
The documentary further talks glorification of toxic love in a sense. With instances of inerviews from Cecilie’s interview where she says, “The moment that I get nervous, that’s when I know there’s something special here.”
She adds, “I’m after that all-consuming [love].”
These instances early on in the documentary set the tone for exactly how dangerous this type of ‘intense’ love can be.
Of the experience, Cecilie even says, “I don’t think I’ll ever be the same again.”
Simon’s entire con is based on luring someone in by showing them a flashy, jet-setting, lifestyle. He tells these women that he’s the scion of the diamond family Leviev. A photoshopped picture with the Leviev diamond family reaffirms this claim.
‘Private jets, cool cars and amazing parties all over the world’ – that’s the bait
On Cecilie’s very first coffee date with Simon, he asks her to accompany him for a business to Bulgaria on his private jet. Instantly creating a whirlwind romantic fantasy for her.
His rolls royce and chauffeur escort her home where she quickly packs and is then driven to the airport. This further reinforces his ‘prince’ image in her mind. Like Cecilie says, ‘It felt like stepping into a movie.’
At this point a voice over also plays over a 1960s MGM-style movie for what’s to come next: It promises an ‘exciting, extravagant, romantic adventure.’
On the private jet itself, she’s served champagne, caviar and sushi. How would that ever lead her to doubt his finances and his claims about being the ‘prince of diamonds’? As far as cons go, it’s a pretty solid one so far.
Moreover, Simon also ‘opens up’ with her, which as Cecilie explains makes you experience an ‘emotional bond’ with this person.
With Cecilie he shows her this lifestyle by then taking her on a private jet under the guise of a business trip to Bulgaria. This reels her in because like she says, this was something she’d never done before. Thus, he ends up showing her a glimpse of a lifestyle he can offer if she were to be with him.
Cecilie even says that you hope that its ‘magical’ and Simon does indeed cast a spell on these women.
Preying upon these women is how his con works. He convinces each one of them that they’re special. He shows them his wealthy lifestyle and once they’re bought into this façade, is when he gets them. That’s his entire ponzi scheme. He convinces them to take loans out or give over their life savings. What he takes from each woman, he spends on another and this way the money pouring in seems endless. His life as a con artist continuously fulfilled and endlessly accommodated, without a day of honest work.
There are two other women who are interviewed during the documentary and they share similar stories of how you lured them and then conned them out of money. You can see right away that he’s playing a very similar game with all three of the women. Cecilie says, “you can sense that he’s a busy guy” because that’s the façade he’s creates for these women. He always meets them in five-star hotels for coffee or at VIP tables at high end clubs where the champagne is flowing.
He then showers these women with attention by telling them that he misses them and he’s thinking of them. In a sea of emotionally unavailable men driven solely by a hook up culture, this comes off refreshing and it’s hard not to get attached.
For the most part, from the start, the documentary often makes you feels like you are in the shoes of these women. It is shot in a way that makes the viewers feel like they too, are on Tinder swiping left and right, rejecting and appreciating profiles and matching with other Tinder users.
The same feeling is carried on when exchanges are shared between Simon and these women. Texts, voice notes and even videos and pictures that have been exchanged between Simon and these women are shared with the viewers. Much like the feeling of going through someone’s phone and reading their private messages.
In my opinion, two goals are achieved through the documentary. So far, it is clear that despite contacting the police and other authorities repeatedly, the efforts by these women to gain justice for how they were robbed and deceived by Simon has been Sisyphean. Since the release of the documentary, Simon’s name is everywhere and the fact that Simon has estimated conned scores of women out of $10 million dollars yet barely served any time and is at large is being heatedly debated. It thus makes it harder for Simon to continue to deceive women and it also makes women more cautious of similar such con schemes in the future.
From a cursory Facebook search alone, I have learned that currently Simon Leviev is a popular searched profile. Digging a bit deeper in the aftermath of the release of the documentary, you learn that Simon has also been banned from most popular dating sites including OkCupid, Hinge and of course, Tinder.
However, perhaps I’m a bit jaded and spoiled by drama style docuseries because just seeing three women be swindled by this man just wasn’t as impactful enough. I wanted to learn about his jail sentence in Finland. I wanted to learn the story of those three women he’d conned there too. I also wanted to know more about the blonde woman who is supposedly the mother of Leviev’s child, the back of whose head is shown fleetingly in the video presumably made by Cecilie as she’s whisked off to Bulgaria on Leviev’s private jet. I was left with more questions than answers by the end of the documentary.
While I understand that in an investigative documentary, especially when the investigation is ongoing, not all details are available and some people may not want to come forward and share their stories. However, the documentary does ultimately leave a sense of dissatisfaction.