There Are Bad Dates and Then There's The Tinder Swindler : Anatomy of a Romance Nightmare
Just in time for Valentine's Day, here's a story to remind you that there are many worse things than being single.
Like the millions of other people who've taken to dating apps in hopes of meeting their soul mate, Cecilie Fjellhøy was just looking to make a connection when she downloaded Tinder and started swiping.
Initially known for facilitating more fleeting encounters, the free service over time evolved into a perfectly legit way to find romance, with that one couple you know who met on Tinder proving that it does happen sometimes.
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So, Cecilie ("Norwegian girl living in an English city") was looking for her fairy-tale ending in 2018 when the then-29-year-old swiped right on Simon Leviev. (He has not been charged with any crimes connected to their relationship.)
In the new Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler, self-described "Tinder expert" Cecilie shares that she's been using the app for seven years, in two countries, and over that time has matched with 1,024 people.
And if the fact that she's still in love with love isn't a testament to the resiliency of the human spirit, we don't know what is.
According to Cecilie's telling:
Simon seemed like a catch when she came across his profile: 28, cute, geographically desirable, and his bio included his Instagram handle, which Cecilie immediately checked to get a fuller picture of who he was. Photos on private jets, another in a helicopter, nice cars, boats, food, a puppy, 103,000 followers—quite the mover and shaker. A too-quick Google search identified him as the son of Israeli diamond magnate Lev Leviev.
Simon wrote right away because, he said, he was leaving London the next day, and suggested they meet for coffee at the Four Seasons Park Lane, a five-star establishment. Auspicious beginning. And when he invited her to just come with him to Bulgaria on a business trip, sending a Rolls Royce to pick her up and take her to the airport, where a jet awaited... swoon! (Though Cecilie's friends on her group text definitely had differing opinions, from "YOLO" to "not safe!!")
"It was quick, but it just felt very natural," Cecilie recalled. (He did pass one test: She was snapping photos and videos for the 'gram, with no objection on his end. If they object, wonder why.)
After a steamy first night together, the next day Simon's phone started blowing up and he told Cecilie he was going to be so busy, she should probably go back to London.
But he did proceed to lovebomb her from afar, texting her all the right things and sending her roses. But, she recalled that it was really hard to find time to meet up, that he was always traveling for work. So when she went home to Oslo and he showed up as a surprise, after telling her it probably wasn't feasible for him to go, she was shook.
Still in a good way. And he asked if she would be his girlfriend—though he needed to tell her something first.
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According to Simon, he was in the middle of getting a $70 million deal done, but his family's business—the diamond industry—was notoriously dangerous and s--t could get real. (He had already told her that the scars on his back were from being attacked while falsely imprisoned in South Africa after a deal gone wrong.)
But Simon was laying the foundation for the moment a few months later when he would message her a terrifying video of his bodyguard being attacked and claim to be in terrible danger. A predicament that he needed money to get out of but he was afraid to use his own credit cards, for fear his enemies could track him down, but if Cecilie could just overnight him her Amex... and if she could just front him a little cash...
Ultimately Cecilie ended up in a $250,000 hole. And the $500,000 check sent by her so-called boyfriend, who was born Shimon Hayut and was not the son of Lev "King of Diamonds" Leviev—and who was reportedly living off the largesse of other women he'd duped—did not go through.
When she called American Express to get to the bottom of what was going on, authorities reached out and asked if she had a picture of her boyfriend.
"They looked at each other and they say, 'That's the guy,'" she recalls in the film.
Horribly depressed, Cecilie returned to Oslo to be with her family and eventually sought treatment after experiencing suicidal thoughts. And once she received more information about what he was accused of doing, she contacted the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang to blow the whistle on her ex.
"We mapped out at least 13 cases, with some of them containing more than one person, families and couples," journalist Erlend Ofte Arntsen told the New York Post about their investigation into Simon's actions. "But this is only what we were able to verify. In our research we came across huge amounts of photos and material that showed different women we not always managed to identify, meaning there could be victims we don't know about."
It was Verdens Gang that first dubbed Simon the "Tinder Swindler" in its shocking report.
The Netflix film goes on to show how Cecilie eventually met two more of Simon's alleged victims, Pernilla Sjöholm of Stockholm (the next woman he started to wine and dine on Cecilie's dime) and Ayleen Charlotte of Amsterdam.
And while Simon hasn't been charged in connection with this trio, he has spent time in prison for bilking others.
According to the Times of Israel, he originally fled the country in 2011 after being charged with theft, forgery and fraud for cashing stolen checks. He settled in Finland and was sentenced to two years in prison there in 2015 on charges of defrauding three women. In 2017, he was sent back to Israel to face trial on the old charges, but he changed his name and left the country again to resume Tinder-swiping in Europe.
Authorities caught up with him in the summer of 2019 when he was arrested in Greece trying to use a fake passport, and he was extradited back to Israel that October.
Also reportedly wanted by authorities for similar alleged crimes in Norway, Sweden and the U.K. when he was convicted of four counts of fraud and sentenced to 15 months in prison in Israel, he was released in May 2020 after only five months—one of a number of non-violent offenders let out early to help decrease the prison population at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pernilla, who says she wasn't romantically involved with Simon but he took financial advantage of their friendship in the amount of $45,000, told Israel's Channel 12 after he was released that she was "shocked" and "really disappointed" by the decision.
"How can you give trust to a man like that, who escaped from Israel twice?" she said. "A man that deceived and swindled women in Europe for hundreds of thousands of euros. Where is the justice?"
A few months before he was sentenced, Simon had denied defrauding the women he'd dated, telling Channel 12, "Maybe they didn't like being in a relationship with me, or the way that I act. Maybe their hearts were broken during the process. I never took a dime from them; these women enjoyed themselves in my company, they traveled and got to see the world on my dime."
But when he was sentenced, he said in court that he was "sorry about everything."
Meanwhile, Pernilla, Cecilie, who started a nonprofit called action: reaction to support victims of fraud, and Ayleen—who made $9,000 selling some of Simon's designer clothes online, a small fraction of the $140,000 she gave him—are still trying to pick up the pieces after their shattering experience.
They would "love for him to see his day in court [for what he did to them]," The Tinder Swindler director Felicity Morris told Newsweek ahead of the the documentary's Feb. 2 premiere. "They've got stacks and stacks of evidence."
Asked how the three women were doing, Morris said, "Well, they're just carrying on really. Cecilie has had to declare herself bankrupt. So they're still fighting their cases in various courts trying to get the fines against them taken away and trying to get courts to understand that they were basically victims, of coercive control."
"Simon is still living his best life on Instagram"—which wasn't set to private until recently, the director said—"with models, and flashy cars, and meanwhile, these women have been left to kind of pick up and kind of try and rise from the ashes of what is left for them. They're all remarkably strong women."
Ayleen doesn't maintain a public profile, but Cecilie and Pernilla have stayed close friends, sharing photos from a trip to Mykonos last year on Instagram and appearing together on the ITV talk show Lorraine to promote the film.
So at least they found each other.
The Tinder Swindler is streaming on Netflix.
