It’s almost a cliché to note that we’re living through a golden age of content and culture inspired by real-life scams and deceptions. One could draw a crazed, Charlie-from-It’s-Always-Sunny-style diagram linking the 2017 Fyre Festival – covered in two 2019 documentaries – to the Anna Delvey scandal, which has sparked a BBC podcast, play and two TV adaptations (Shonda Rhimes’ Netflix miniseries drops on 11 February, while a rival show is still in the works at HBO).
This tangled web of pop culture cons arguably includes Sweet Bobby, the recent hit podcast about catfished Londoner Kirat Assi. It might even stretch back to 2010, when Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman gave us the term ‘catfish’ in their film of the same name. Now, we can add another true catfish/conman tale to the board: The Tinder Swindler, a new Netflix documentary directed by Felicity Morris (Don't F**k with Cats).
Cecilie Fjellhøy is one of several women who were taken in by the titular swindler, aka Israeli grifter Simon Leviev. She understands why people are obsessed with stories of hustlers, charlatans and imposters because she’s fascinated by them, too. “That type of thing has always been my guilty pleasure – the true crime podcasts, the shows,” the 33-year-old tells GQ over Zoom.
Fjellhøy, a Norwegian user experience designer based in London, believed she was in a loving relationship with Leviev for several months in 2018. Ultimately, she says he left her in more than £200,000 worth of debt after she took out huge credit card loans to send him money, which he promised he would repay. To this day, Fjellhøy enjoys con content that “delves into the ‘why’”, as well as the who, what, where and how. Why do certain people become con artists? Why are they able to ruthlessly exploit and manipulate others?
This question is never fully answered in The Tinder Swindler. Leviev – born Shimon Hayut – refused to participate in the film, and his psychology remains largely opaque. We do learn that he used money leeched from Fjellhøy and other women to fund his international playboy lifestyle. The documentary maps out how he’d fly from European city to European city, establishing romantic relationships and intense friendships with women he met on dating apps.
Leviev told these women he was a member of a real-life Israeli diamond dynasty, and presented himself as sweet, honest and emotionally available. Once he’d manipulated women into caring about him, Leviev would start tapping them for vast sums of cash, usually by telling them his life was under threat due to “enemies” in the diamond business (he was always careful to hint that his familial and professional world was dangerous, as well as luxurious). He assured his victims he would pay them back. Then he’d keep rinsing them for money until they had nothing, financially or emotionally, left to give.
It’s an astonishing story, with a vast cast of characters – including Leviev’s expansive entourage – moving against a backdrop of private jets, luxury hotels and extravagant shopping trips. “This guy works hard,” acknowledges Pernilla Sjoholm. “He and his team – this is their full-time job, and they’re very good at it.”
Sjoholm, a former sales employee from Sweden, became “best friends” with Leviev after matching with him on Tinder in Stockholm in 2018. Their platonic friendship unfolded across a summer of extravagant European holidays – trips unwittingly funded by Fjellhøy, sat in London worried about her boyfriend’s safety.
Later, Sjoholm would drain her savings to try and help Leviev escape his “enemies”. Overall, she estimates he took between £50,000 and £60,000 from her. At 35, she is now bankrupt and lives with her mother. “It's still a struggle,” she tells GQ. “It was the ultimate betrayal. My friend was out to destroy me.”
- LifestyleJust don't call them mannies
But while the specifics of Fjellhøy and Sjoholm’s stories are extraordinary, the fundamentals – people being scammed out of life-altering sums of money – are not so unusual. UK bank fraud reached an all-time high in 2020, costing victims £479m. That figure rose to £754m in the first half of last year, with reports of romance fraud alone soaring 40 per cent in the year to April 2021. UK Finance, the main banking body, has warned that fraud in the UK has reached a level where it poses a “national security threat”.
Around 8 per cent of Britons admitted to having been conned. But because being taken for a ride is surrounded by so much shame, the true percentage is likely much higher. Fjellhøy and Sjoholm say they wanted to speak out about what Leviev did to them, in part, to dismantle the stigma around being scammed.
Con artists rely on their victims feeling humiliated, observes Sjoholm: “Most people don't even report the fraud because they are ashamed, so we let these criminals get away with it.” After she started talking about her experience publicly (the Norwegian newspaper VG first covered Fjellhøy and Sjoholm’s stories in 2019), Sjoholm says people would approach her on the street in Sweden to share their own scam experiences. She heard endless stories of business fraud, but people wouldn’t “dare talk about it [publicly]. You ask, ‘Why haven’t you reported this?’ And people are like, ‘Oh no, I can’t, it wouldn’t look good for my business.’”
Being scammed or defrauded can be psychologically devastating. One 2015 study by researchers at Cambridge University concluded that the psychological and emotional effects of scams are as detrimental and pervasive as the financial impact, with romance scams taking the biggest emotional toll. Action Fraud receives hundreds of fraud reports a week where victims show signs of severe emotional distress, including suicidal thoughts, and the monetary cost to UK scam victims' wellbeing is estimated at £9.3bn a year.
- LifestyleJust don't call them mannies
Despite this evidence, Fjellhøy and Sjoholm believe there is not enough awareness of the emotional and mental trauma of being conned. Fjellhøy, who became suicidal following the scam and ended up in psychiatric care, says that realising the man she loved didn’t exist was like “a death”. But she had no time to process her grief before creditors started aggressively pursuing her for debts she’d accrued to help Leviev, and she ended up being taken to court by four banks.
The Tinder Swindler also shows how both women had to fight for police in multiple countries to take their accounts of what happened seriously, something they chalk up at least in part to sexism. (While Leviev was eventually jailed in Israel, he has never been charged for crimes related to Fjellhøy and Sjoholm, and denies their claims of fraud.)
“What we have gone through is very surreal,” says Fjellhøy. “But how we’ve been treated afterwards by the system…”
“It’s even worse,” says Sjoholm.
“There's so much that is wrong [with how scam victims are treated],” says Fjellhøy, who has founded a non-profit organisation called Action: Reaction to support individuals affected by fraud. She acknowledges that improving structural responses to fraud is a hugely complex, “big picture” issue. “But we can start with understanding how to speak to fraud victims.” This applies to ordinary people as well as institutions, she observes; she has lost friends who couldn’t understand or empathise with what she’s been through. “Then we need laws and legislations in place [to better protect victims].”
“The police don’t have enough resources to deal with fraud, and it literally destroys people’s lives,” says Sjoholm. She is based in Sweden, but this is just as true in the UK: this week, the Treasury Committee published a report that concluded “economic crime seems not be a priority for law enforcement”. The cross-party group of MPs on the committee has now recommended the creation of a new government department and new law enforcement agency to get to grips with the issue.
Fjellhøy says she is often asked for tips on how to avoid being conned by people on dating apps. She doesn’t think it’s a particularly useful question: “You need trust in society. And as long as you have trust, you will have fraud.”
But she does have advice for people who have already been scammed. “Please don't feel ashamed. Be open and honest, and please, please report,” says Fjellhøy. She also recommends seeking “peer support”, and says her friendship with Sjoholm has helped her more than seeing a professional therapist.
Sjoholm agrees. “Make sure you talk with people who’ve experienced similar things. Cecilie really understands what I have been through; I don't know what I would have done without her.” People do kill themselves in the wake of financial fraud, she observes. “Talking is life-saving.”
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