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‘Catfishing on a whole other level’: the shocking story of the Tinder Swindler
The Netflix documentary unravels the financial and emotional cons of Simon Leviev, who scammed women who thought he was their friend or boyfriend
When Cecilie Fjellhøy first met the man she knew as Simon Leviev for a 10am coffee date at the Four Seasons Hotel in London in January 2018, he seemed to align with his Tinder profile. His pictures were flashy – designer clothes and expensive sunglasses in luxury cars and private jets – and his in-person demeanor was equally debonair. “He has this magnetism,” Fjellhøy recalls of her first impression in the Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler, out this week. “There’s something about this guy that is special.”
Fjellhøy, then a 29-year-old Norwegian graduate student living in London, was charmed by the man who claimed to be the “prince of diamonds”, a billionaire heir to the diamond fortune of the Israeli magnate Lev Leviev. And she was surprised: Simon had to leave that afternoon for a business trip in Sofia, Bulgaria. Would she like to go with him via private jet? She agreed – “I felt I would be stupid if I said no,” she says – and the film, directed by Felicity Morris, stitches together the trip through the documentation on Fjellhøy’s phone. There’s a “Yolo” WhatsApp message to her friends; photos of Leviev’s security team aboard the private jet; video of the woman and toddler Leviev said were his ex and child, and one in which Fjellhøy kisses him on the cheek. They spent the night together in the hotel, and she flew back to London the next day, smitten with the man with whom she began exchanging messages daily.
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