Several years ago, I was involved in a long-distance relationship with a girl I’d met online. When I told an older German acquaintance of mine about her and how I had met her over the internet, he was utterly perplexed. He didn’t understand how you could meet someone in a virtual space and then create a real relationship with that person in the physical world. When I told him about the mechanisms of online dating — the creation of profiles, the seemingly endless scrolling through an infinite number of match possibilities, and the similarly endless procession of swiping left or right — he went from perplexed to downright disturbed. “What do you mean?” he asked, in his German-accented English. “What is this, an online Auschwitz? ‘You, to the left; you, to the right…’?”
Thankfully, no. But a whole host of scammers and predators do lurk in online dating sites, preying upon unsuspecting daters who are merely looking for a romantic connection. These scams are usually financial in nature — phishing schemes in which criminals attempt to pry sensitive personal information such as credit card and Social Security numbers from their victims — but some of these scams can have rather dire consequences. They can lead to enormous losses of money, crippling debt, and in some cases even death — or at least the contemplation of it.
These dangers are presented to us in all of their shameful ugliness in The Tinder Swindler, Netflix’s new documentary about an online dating con artist who defrauded women he met on Tinder out of an estimated $10 million. The fraudster is named Simon Leviev (one of several aliases, we learn). He posed as the son of Lev Leviev, an Israeli billionaire and CEO of LLD Diamonds who is known as “the king of diamonds,” making Simon “the prince of diamonds.” Simon created a very attractive Tinder profile with links to an Instagram account that showed him on yachts, in helicopters, in front of Lamborghinis. He appeared to have been the real thing — the diamond-in-the-rough prince charming crossed with Christian Grey every girl dreams of. He took his dates on expensive lunches at five-star hotels and flew them on private jets from one European city to the next. He wore the same name-brand designer clothing (Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton) and expensive watches that he sported in his pictures. And, most importantly, he looked in person exactly like he looked in his pictures. And when his dates Googled him — because “you’re always supposed to Google anyone you go out on a date with,” says one of his victims — everything appeared to check out: the news stories about him and his father, the 100,000-follower Instagram account, the jet-setting, playboy lifestyle, and everything else he claimed to be in his profile. This was not (to borrow an image made famous by our 45th president) some 400-pound person sitting on his bed phishing for a few credit cards with profile pictures of models stolen off the internet. This was a professional criminal, someone who was extremely good at what he did. He was as thoughtful in his criminal schemes as he was with the women he dated, creating the impression that he really loved them by listening to them (something that is “very rare in men,” as one of his victims says) just as attentively as he attended to every detail of his multimillion-dollar frauds. He gave the women he dated no reason to believe that he was not 100% “for real” — despite the fact, as one of his victims says, that absolutely “nothing about him is real.”
Simon’s story is told through the lens of two Scandinavian women he defrauded — Cecilie Fjellhoy of Norway and Pernilla Sjoholm of Sweden. We hear Cecilie’s story first. Cecilie, a longtime Tinder user and self-described “Tinder expert,” excitedly texted her friends about a self-professed billionaire’s son she’s just matched with who wants to take her on his private jet across Europe. “But you could be abducted!” one friend writes, concerned that Cecilie hardly even knows him. To which Cecilie replies: “YOLO!” You only live once — and with decisions like these, not for very long.
Everything about him and their time together in Bulgaria seemed regal to her. She places a heart emoji next to his name in her phone contacts. Although he is very tied up with his business, he claims, and cannot spend more time with her at the moment and therefore must send her back home, they continue talking. Soon thereafter, he comes to meet her in Oslo and asks her to move in with him and be his girlfriend. Cecilie is overjoyed — this is more than her dreams coming true; these are her impossible fantasies come to life. He tells her that he’s budgeted $15,000 a month for apartments and wants her to go to London to pick one out. Flush with excitement like Cinderella preparing for the ball, she gets a picture of his bloodied bodyguard and a message from him saying that he can no longer use his credit cards because his enemies have tracked his location based on his card usage. He asks her to let him use her card, which she immediately agrees to. After he quickly maxes out her card, he tells her that he needs her to bring $25,000 in cash to him in Amsterdam. She doesn’t have that much money to spare, so she takes out a loan and flies to Holland with a suitcase full of cash.
Eight loans later, Cecilie finds herself in debt to the tune of $250,000 in high-interest loans that she had taken out for Simon. Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, crushed by debt and by heartbreak, kill themselves; Cecilie, finding herself in the same situation as Anna and Emma, contemplates doing the same. We may feel sympathy for (and even root for) other classic cinematic con men and swindlers — from Henry Gondorff and Johnny Hooker (Paul Newman and Robert Redford) in The Sting to Frank Abagnale (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio again) in Catch Me If You Can and The Wolf of Wall Street, but by the end of The Tinder Swindler, we feel nothing but disgust for Leviev. (Though, of course, if he were being played by Paul Newman or Leonardo DiCaprio, we might not feel quite this same degree of revulsion toward him.)
Much of the chatter surrounding The Tinder Swindler has been about how it is a documentary that exposes not so much online con-artistry as it does female delusion. Even after Cecilie finds out that Simon conned her, she cannot remove the heart emoji next to his name in her phone because she “still wanted that fantasy to be true.” But just as many men have been defrauded by women (or at least by online daters posing as women) on dating sites as there have been women cheated by men. Men and women are equally vulnerable to such schemes because the quest for love is one of the most perilous pursuits we can undertake. The rewards are great, but the risks involved when we make ourselves vulnerable and entrust our hearts to another can be even greater. This is why Dante places those who defraud one another in relationships in an even lower level of Hell than he places those guilty of gluttony, greed, avarice, and prodigality. And it’s why, in contrast to the other sinners we see in Dante’s Inferno, we see the victims of such relationship swindlers (such as Medea, who was betrayed by the Greek mythological hero Jason) being able to witness their defrauders being punished. We need to know that their victims will be able to have their vengeance. Because while stolen money can be repaid, a stolen heart is far more difficult to recover.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
