When Cecilie Fjellhoy, a 29-year-old Norwegian grad pupil residing in London, swiped proper on a 28-year-old supposed billionaire diamond inheritor on Tinder in 2018, she thought she’d discovered her Prince Charming. However the supposed dream man, who known as himself Simon Leviev, turned out to be a nightmare, a world con man that duped her out of $250,000 and landed her within the psych ward.
Netflix’s jaw-dropping new documentary “The Tinder Swindler” (out Feb. 2) tells Fjellhoy’s story and people of two different Leviev victims: Swedish advertising exec Pernilla Sjoholm and Dutch fashionista Ayleen Charlotte.
“After I noticed Simon’s footage, he had the sort of look that I like,” Fjellhoy says within the movie.
Leviev’s profile confirmed a person who appeared to stay a jet-setting life full of fashionable fits and designer garments, sipping cocktails on unique seashores and attending high-powered enterprise conferences. Fjellhoy had no purpose to doubt that he was the “Prince of Diamonds” that he portrayed himself to be. She even Googled him, and located that there was certainly a billionaire Russian-Israeli diamond mogul, Lev Leviev a okay a “The King of Diamonds,” who she took to be her suitor’s father. In actuality, the 2 males weren’t associated, and Lev doesn’t have a son named Simon.
“This man is simply having a really totally different life than I ever would expertise, I used to be simply pondering it could be sort of cool to fulfill up,” Fjellhoy says.
A fairy story courtship
After a number of lavish dates, together with one on a personal jet, Leviev requested Fjellhoy to be his girlfriend and began referring to her as his “future spouse.” However, since he traveled always for his supposed work, a lot of their relationship was long-distance, performed by texts and calls with occasional visits. Leviev informed Fjellhoy that the diamond trade was “harmful” and he had unspecified “enemies.” To again up his claims, he confirmed her pictures of bullets that he’d been despatched within the mail and a picture of his bodyguard, Peter, wanting bloody and beat up after an “assault.”
“He mentioned, ‘They’re going after me, thank God for Peter – if not, I'd have been lifeless,’” Fjellhoy says within the movie.
Leviev then claimed he was unable to make use of his bank cards as a result of his enemies might hint him that means. When he requested Fjellhoy if he might use her American Specific card briefly, for “two weeks or one thing,” she didn’t hesitate.
“I’m his girlfriend. In fact we’re going to assist one another, it wasn’t even a query,” she says. She additionally had no purpose to doubt that he might pay her again, since he foot the invoice on all their dates and she or he believed that he was a billionaire. Within the house of a month, she lent him almost $100,000.
“Each second or third day is a brand new request,” she says within the documentary. “Every time he maxes out the cardboard, I've to take out a brand new mortgage.”
On the time, Fjellhoy believed that she was paying to help Leviev and his staff and fund costly enterprise lunches in Stockholm, the place her love had fled for supposed security causes. In actuality, he was utilizing Fjellhoy’s cash to take a brand new Tinder goal — Sjoholm — out in town.
Earlier than lengthy, Fjellhoy had lent him $250,000. He despatched her a verify to reimburse her for $500,000 — showing beneficiant, since that was for greater than she had lent him — however it didn’t undergo. Confused, she contacted American Specific and had a gathering with two brokers who requested her to share a photograph of her boyfriend.
“They checked out one another they usually say, ‘That’s the man,’ ” Fjellhoy says. “They mentioned, ‘He’s knowledgeable, he does this for a residing. All the things is a lie. He’s not a prince of diamonds, son of a billionaire.’ The person I like was by no means actual, he faked all the pieces. It was horrible, as a result of in a way, I nonetheless cherished him — or the individual I believed he was … I don’t perceive how somebody may be so f – – king evil. I felt that he knew me.”
In debt and suicidal
She returned residence to Oslo to stick with her mom, changing into so despondent about her debt, she thought-about suicide and checked herself right into a psych ward. Whereas there, she contacted American Specific to seek out out extra info and discovered that her lover’s actual title was Shimon Hayut and that he’d been arrested in 2015 for defrauding three Finnish ladies.
“I needed to cease him,” Fjellhoy says.
She reached out to Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang and despatched journalists there almost 400 pages of her textual content correspondence with Leviev.
Due to Fjellhoy’s tip, VG journalists together with Natalie Remoe Hansen, Kristoffer Kumar and Erlend Ofte Arntsen had been capable of monitor down Hayut’s mom in Israel, who denied having contact with him in years. The Israeli police, in the meantime, confirmed that Hayut is an Israel-born fraudster who fled in 2011 to skip out on sentencing for fraud, theft and forgery. He served two years in a Finnish jail from 2015 to 2017 for defrauding a number of ladies, earlier than he was despatched again to Israel in 2017.
Utilizing a pretend passport, he fled once more, and continued to prey upon ladies corresponding to Fjellhoy, Sjoholm and Charlotte, utilizing their cash to fund his lavish life-style and proceed his con. The documentary estimates that he’s swindled $10 million, and the journalists within the movie say he had at the least a dozen victims — and certain many extra. (The filmmakers reached out to Hayut for touch upon the allegations within the doc, and he responded by calling it “defamation and lies.”)
Victims all around the world
“We mapped out at the least 13 instances, with a few of them containing multiple individual, households and couples,” Arntsen informed The Put up. “However that is solely what we had been capable of confirm. In our analysis we got here throughout enormous quantities of pictures and materials that confirmed totally different ladies we not at all times managed to establish, that means there could possibly be victims we don’t learn about.”
“The response [to initial reporting of Fjellhoy’s story] was overwhelming,” journalist Hansen says within the movie. “We had been contacted by victims all around the world…he was reported to the police in at the least 7 totally different international locations.”
Since he was utilizing different folks’s bank cards to journey, he was troublesome to hint. As a result of he performed his grift on ladies who lived all around the world, it additionally made it troublesome for native police in every lady’s hometown to go after somebody who was “a small rip-off of their world,” VG journalist Arntsen explains within the documentary. “It’s virtually the right rip-off.”
However because of intel from Fjellhoy, and later Sjoholm and Charlotte, Interpol caught him in Greece in 2019. He was sentenced to fifteen months for the fraud he dedicated in Israel.
However, it’s not fairly a happily-ever-after ending. Hayut was launched early, in Could 2020 after simply 5 months and amid COVID-19 jail considerations. He's residing as a free man in Israel. Fjellhoy and his different victims are nonetheless imprisoned by debt, slowly digging themselves out of the deep monetary holes he pushed them into.
“The one factor we will do is get his face on the market,” Sjoholm says in “The Tinder Swindler.” “If folks know who he's and acknowledge his face, he can’t do that anymore.”
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