Spoiler Alert: If you intend to watch this movie and would rather go in blissfully ignorant of the sordid details, then return to this review later. In the meantime, whether or not you decide to watch, if you are not paying off a quarter million dollars in debt owed to eight different European banks, like one poor victim of the swindler in question, count your blessings.
A major character flaw I really wish therapy had freed me from already is helplessly succumbing to catchy headlines that pop up on whatever media I happen to be scrolling through. Sometimes the rabbit hole turns out to bear good fruit, like that time in 2015 when I read the news about that year’s Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Svetlana Alexievich, and discovered the way I wanted to approach writing for the rest of my life. Or the time someone on Twitter recommended “Small Things Like These,” and I spent several happy hours immersed in a good novel for a change.
But this afternoon at 2 p.m. was not one of those times. Rather, I’d just settled in to fold laundry, still dressed half snowday-casual, half Zoom-meeting-ready in flannel pajama bottoms and a turtleneck sweater, when I opened Netflix, and thereby bid farewell to two otherwise perfectly respectable hours of my life.
Or perhaps the hours were not truly lost? Sometimes it’s a blurred line between waste of time and time well-spent, isn’t it? I’m writing this now because I sense there is, if not redeeming value to the movie Netflix instructed me to turn my attention to, then at least some good reason it resonated, an explanation for why now it feels like a less regrettable viewing experience than, say, “The Masked Singer.”
“The Tinder Swindler” is a full-length documentary that just dropped, about the outrageous machinations and brazen deeds of an Israeli con artist named Simon Leviev who preyed on women he met through Tinder, and in an even more outrageous twist is now somehow a free man (thanks to COVID), sipping yet another glass of champagne on yet another yacht, with yet another lovely woman at his side. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Leviev’s business strategy was brilliant. Have one girlfriend bankroll the next one. First, he connects with the new mark on Tinder, wines and dines her on private planes, in five-star hotels and restaurants, tells her he wants to make a future with her. Then, when they’re apart, contacts her in a panic, sends her photos of his bloodied bodyguard, claims people are after him, and she needs to spot him money right away that he’ll pay back ASAP. Then he demands more money, then some more. With these funds he’s able to wine and dine the next Tinder girl.
It is “a story about females, told by females,” in the words of producer Bernie Higgins. You could say that the whole production is a cautionary tale about being single, female, and well-resourced, I suppose, though that side of the tale is not so fleshed out. The filmmakers did not press too hard on the question of what, if any, common qualities among the swindler’s victims might make a woman inclined to give away all her money to a man she doesn’t know very well.
I was impressed by the level of candor and trust the filmmakers were able to reach with their main subjects, three women — Cecelie, Pernilla, and Ayleen — who were deceived and ripped off by Leviev, but as far as I could tell they didn’t share any common personality traits. (Ayleen, for my money, is the cleverest of the three. She figured out a way to swindle the swindler.)
By the time the movie was made, the women had gotten used to telling their stories, and had already absorbed waves of online mockery and sympathy. The Swedish tabloid Verdens Gang (VG) ran a front-page story about Leviev’s defrauding of Cecelie and Pernilla three years ago, and I imagine if I were a twenty-something woman living in Amsterdam, Oslo, or Munich, I’d have known all about him back then.
But I had to admire Leviev’s chutzpah and ingenuity. He knew his prey would google the name and be led to actual billionaire “King of Diamonds” Lev Leviev, though Simon has, of course, no connection. Instead, as we discover in the one scene in which I felt any human sympathy for the man, his actual origins were humble. His real name was Shimon Yehuda Hayut, and it would appear he grew up in a cramped apartment complex outside of Tel Aviv with his mother, who denied him three times when journalists showed up at her door. “I have absolutely no contact with him. I have nothing to do with him … I haven’t had contact with him since he was 18 years old.” He was wanted by the police in Israel, we learn, which is no doubt why he never stayed in one place for long.
I see, as I write, that really there’s just not that much meat on the bones of this tale. The most interesting aspect of the story is also its most inexplicable. I get how easy it would be to be taken in by a glossy lifestyle, but how could perfectly normal, intelligent, even worldly, young women fall for the “Get me more money” line over and over and over again. Convince me to send you $20,000 once, shame on you. But convince me three, five, seven times? Are they just fools? Are there dozens of other would-be victims out there who were not taken in by the designer brands and sports cars, and wisely swiped left.
“The Tinder Swindler” is a title that creatives can only dream of, but in fact Tinder, as Cecelie points out, really had nothing to do with it. Simon could have found his way to his marks through a dozen or more dating apps or social media sites or, for that matter, the old-fashioned way, without the mediation of technology. Like Alejandro, in 1996.
At one level of my emotional memory, this story hits close to home. I used to be a pretty easy mark myself. All it takes is a little loneliness, mixed with a prior betrayal or two. I was a savvy young woman, having lived on my own in Milan for a year, and still I was taken in by a serial liar and con man. I’d discovered just a few months prior that a different man, the first love of my life, had kept himself a second girlfriend. Then along came Alejandro. He wanted to be with me, but first he had to go to Miami, and would I pay for his ticket, please, he was low on funds at the moment. He promised he’d wire me the money just as soon as he got to his uncle’s house. I was so open to believing the unbelievable that when I called him two weeks later, nervous, trying to play it cool, I backtracked immediately when he teased me for my lack of faith.
“Checking in about your money, aren’t you? I sent it three days ago, stop worrying! Don’t you trust me??”
