The Tinder Swindler: Is Everything True In The Netflix Docufilm? Here What We Know

Our relationships have changed since there have been platforms like Tinder, the world’s most used online dating and dating application. Love 2.0 is now just a click and swipe away, but in the age of the immaterial and digital identities, sentimental scams are always around the corner. The Tinder Swindler provides valuable testimony.

The true crime documentary by Felicity Morris , former producer of the docuseries Hands off cats: hunt for an online killer , arrives on Netflix when her “villain”, the Israeli Shimon Yehuda Hayut, better known as Simon Leviev, is still on Instagram (who knows for how long) with a private account of almost 100,000 followers. But between messages, voices, photos and videos on WhatsApp, Google searches, transactions and airline tickets, is what you see in the film really true? And what happened to the various protagonists of this incredible story? Let’s find out together.

The Tinder Swindler: The Plot Of The Netflix Docufilm

The Tinder Swindler reconstructs the Ponzi scheme of Simon Leviev, a young Israeli who presents himself on Tinder as “the prince of diamonds” , a rich businessman son of the tycoon Lev, a “mogul” of Uzbek origins with a billion dollar fortune . Simon has a seductive profile with which he attracts women from all over the world thanks to his charm and above all to his money.

Leviev wears designer and fashionable clothes, attends luxury hotels, dines in exclusive restaurants, travels on a private jet to suggestive locations around the globe. When the match starts, it’s easy to win the trust of the singles who gravitate to the app. As if wealth automatically conferred ethics and respectability . In fact, this is not the case: Shimon Yehuda Hayut is an imposter. He passes himself off as a rampant nabob and ends up robbing his victims of millions of dollars.

The True Story and VG’s Investigation

What appears in the documentary is all true Starting with the figure of Lev Leviev (the powerful tycoon’s nickname is “the king of diamonds” and LLD Diamonds really exists) and the testimonies of Cecilie Fjellhøy and Pernilla Sjöholm. Cecilie is the Norwegian girl who lives and works in London, where she met (physically) Simon for the first time. Becoming her fiancée, she fell into the trick of the cheat: Leviev pretended to be the victim of threats from phantom “enemies” in business and that her accounts and his papers were blocked for security reasons. So he got huge sums of money, either borrowed or saved, with a promise to pay them back. Obviously, this commitment was never kept.

Cecilie Fjellhøy has accumulated over £180,000 in debt. Today her meeting with Simon is just a bad page from her past. The woman still lives in London, is single, works as a Senior UX and Service Designer for Sopra Steria (a French digital services and consultancy company) and founded the Action: reaction organization in Norway, a non-profit supporting the victims of financial scams. She hasn’t given up on her her Instagram and Tinder profiles because she says she is “always looking for love”.

Pernilla Sjöholm is the 31-year-old Swedish girl who crossed paths with Simon Leviev on Tinder in March 2018. The two are not together but become good friends: in the company of his girlfriend, the model Polina, they spend a summer of travel and fun in Amsterdam, Stockholm, Mykonos and Rome. She always pays the generous Simon, with the money slipped from the other victims: it is her scheme. Three months later, he presents the bill to Pernilla about her: he confesses that he is in trouble because he is attacked by the usual “enemies” and is in desperate need of cash. Sjöholm trusts her and does not hold back: she gives him 30 thousand euros (the savings she is putting aside to buy a house) and finances him various plane tickets. Before discovering that it’s all fake the “compensation” check and the expensive half-million dollar watch.

Like her friend Cecilie, Pernilla has put this misadventure behind her. She lives in Stockholm and runs a company in the restaurant business and especially on Instagram she is very active. When the authorities decided to release Shimon after just five months, Sjöholm gave a harsh interview to Channel 12 , in which he accused the Israeli judicial system of reducing his sentence and trusting “such a man”, a “runaway scoundrel” twice by Israel who deceived and swindled women in Europe for hundreds of thousands of Euros”.

Yep, Shimon Hayut is incredibly on the loose Despite a serious precedent in 2011 in Israel for fraud, theft and robbery (but fled the country before he could be tried) and two years behind bars in Finland in 2015 for defrauding three women, including a single mother to whom he subtracted 45 thousand euros. The “conman” and cynical manipulator, with a background in an ultra-Orthodox Bnei Brak family that deserves another film, was arrested in Greece in 2019 in a joint operation between Interpol and the Israeli police.

Extradited to Israel, the “fake billionaire” was sentenced by a Tel Aviv judge to 15 months in prison and a $6,333 fine plus $43,289 in compensation. The man who stole over $ 10 million from women around the world has not been charged with any other crime. In May 2020, after five months in prison and as part of a program aimed at reducing the prison population for fear of a Covid epidemic among inmates, Hayut was released.

Now Shimon is 31, engaged to an Israeli model and runs an online consulting business, as the ending of the Netflix documentary reveals. An investigation by Channel 12 even revealed that Yohanan Hayut, Shimon’s father and chief rabbi of the El Al airline, was involved with his son in a scam of hundreds of millions of shekels against several businessmen. Hayut continues to argue his innocence, going so far as to say that the charges against him derive only from “a loan between friends gone wrong”.

Maybe they didn’t like being in a relationship with me, or the way I behaved. Maybe their hearts were broken in the process. I never got a dime from these women. They used me for my life, received expensive gifts, traveled and saw the world at my expense. In other words, they were greedy only interested in money. When I asked for help, they accepted and knew I had problems. I haven’t run away from anyone: it’s all lies and fake news.

To frame Shimon and take his revenge was Ayleen Charlotte , the latest girlfriend of Simon Leviev. The two meet at the end of 2017 and stay together for 14 months, before Ayleen accidentally discovers VG’s investigation on social media that nails her partner. The Dutch girl understands that the messages, videos, photos that Simon sent her and the ways in which he stole money from her are repeated according to a consolidated system. Thus she organizes her “revenge” to avenge herself and the other women for the abuses suffered.

It is Ayleen who alerts the police of Hayut’s trip to Greece as well as the pseudonym he allegedly used: David Sharon. Since then, however, Charlotte has preferred to stay away from the news and social media: all we know about her is that she lives in Amsterdam, works in the fashion world and is slowly repaying her debts, starting with the revenues obtained by selling most of them online of Simon’s designer clothes.

Shimon Hayut’s arrest is due to an article in the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang, entitled The Tinder Swindler: an investigation costing a lot of money and a lot of effort and accompanied by photos, videos and precious audio testimonials. The four VG reporters – Natalie Remøe Hansen, Kristoffer Kumar, Erlend Ofte Arntsen and Tore Kristiansen – collected the statements of Cecilie Fjellhøy and Pernilla Sjöholm, received straight from colleague Uri Blau and from police officer Hanny Giladi and spent six months in chasing the scammer across different continents: in the end they found him in Munich, in one of the trendiest hotels in Europe, as seen at the end of the film. Journalists have repeatedly tried to get in touch with Simon Leviev, but without success. His attorney, Yaki Kahan, admits he has lost all contact with his client. Director Felicity Morris and producer Bernadette Higgins fared far worse: Hayut responded to their request to join the film with a voice message. “I will sue you for defamation and false accusations – she said at two -. All this is based on a lie And that’s it, it will go like this.”