Emmy-Nominated Creators Of ‘The Tinder Swindler’ On Their Goal For Netflix Documentary — “Expose” A World-Class Fraudster
11.08.2022 - 18:39
/ deadline.com
There are smooth talkers, and then there’s Simon Leviev. Compared to him, most conmen are slick as sandpaper.
This is how Simon rolled: go on the dating app Tinder, pose as a guy looking for love. Attributes: handsome, emotionally available, sharp dresser, and oh yeah, rich. Really rich. With pluses like that, who wouldn’t swipe right? A lot of smart, beautiful, even sophisticated women did, as revealed in the Emmy-nominated Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler.
“The women in the film, first and foremost, they were looking for a boyfriend. They were single, a bit lonely. And that was why they were on Tinder swiping, swiping,” explains director Felicity Morris. “Certainly, they saw in Simon something that would take them out of their ordinary life. There were pictures of him on private jets. He looked like a businessman. And I think that, for them, was really attractive.”
Norwegian-born Cecilie Fjellhøy and Dutch native Ayleen Charlotte were among the women who fell for Leviev’s chimeric charms. They ultimately discovered Simon was not after love but lucre. His tales of being an Israeli diamond tycoon’s son—pure fiction. The jet-setting lifestyle was real enough, but it was bankrolled through a sort of Ponzi scheme. He’d tap one mark for hundreds of thousands of dollars, use that money to fund a life of luxury, then share plenty of images on Tinder to convince the next mark he indeed rivaled James Bond as an International Man of Intrigue. To get women to drain their bank accounts and take out loans for his benefit, he moaned about temporary cash flow problems, but assured them he would pay them back.
“A big purpose of us telling the story was to publicly shame–or I suppose ‘expose’ would be the better word–Simon Leviev,”