12 The Times Magazineight catfishing be our next true
crime obsession? As cold case
murders were to the past half-
decade, might online swindlers
who leverage romantic intrigue
to commit cruel, emotionally
and financially costly cons
against besotted victims- “catfishers” – prove the
most compelling subject for
podcasts and documentaries and audiobooks
and quasi-fictionalised ITV reconstructions
in the emerging-from-Covid era?
Maybe. If 2021 ended – culturally speaking - with breathless talk of Tortoise Media’s Sweet
Bobby podcast, a compelling investigation
into the extraordinarily involved, decade-long
deception of British woman Kirat Assi by the
most unlikely of online villains, then 2022
certainly kicks off with Netflix’s The Tinder
Swindler, a 114-minute documentary detailing
the life, cons, cruelty, downfall and putative
rise from the ashes of fake international
playboy Simon Leviev, more truthfully, a
twentysomething grifter called Shimon Huyut.
Let’s call him “Leviev” for now – that’s how
his victims knew him. He’s a flashily dressed
chap, good-looking, who met his marks
on dating app Tinder, romanced them in a
heady whirl of private jets, five-star hotels and
several thousand euros worth of VIP tables in
Europe’s splashiest nightclubs, before fleecing
them for tens of thousands – sometimes,
hundreds of thousands. It’s not entirely clear
how many women Leviev seduced, stole from,
then abandoned, but three of the most recent
ones – Norwegian Cecilie Fjellhoy, Swede
Pernilla Sjoholm and Ayleen Charlotte from
the Netherlands, all of whom conspired to
get Leviev arrested and imprisoned – have
told their stories to Felicity Morris, the
documentary-maker behind Don’t F***
with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer.
And, bloody hell, it’s good telly.
The Tinder Swindler starts with Cecilie
Fjellhoy, a peachy-skinned, blonde, terribly
pretty computer programmer, who dreams
of Disney-perfect love affairs and even now
clings to the idea there is a Prince Charming
out there somewhere, waiting for her, despite
everything. Fjellhoy – 29 years old at the
time of her catfishing, freshly relocated from
Norway to London, a self-described “Tinder
expert” – swiped right (Tinder lexicon for
“expresses interest”) on Simon Leviev’s profile
in January 2018.
Why?
“He had the kind of look I like,” she says
in the film. Footage of his Tinder profile
plays and viewers are introduced to Leviev as
Fjellhoy was. We see him – 29 according to his
profile – in a succession of photographs, cross-
legged, tanned and entitled on the deck of a
yacht, strapped into the copilot’s seat of a
helicopter in flight, lounging in a leather seat
in the cabin of a private jet. He is sharply
dressed, preciously groomed and above all,
rich-looking and seemingly extravagant.
It wasn’t just the impression of richness
that appealed to Fjellhoy, though: it was as
much a question of the drive this indicated.
Though, she adds, “It’s like Marilyn Monroe in
the movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes when she
says, ‘Don’t you know that a man being rich is
like a girl being pretty? You might not marry a
girl just because she’s pretty but, my goodness,
doesn’t it help?’ It’s a very true quote. You want
the full package.” Fjellhoy “matched” with
Leviev, Leviev having already swiped right on
her profile; within hours, she met him for a
date in the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel
on Park Lane in central London. He explains,
he’s staying there while on a business trip.
“He has this magnetism,” Fjellhoy says.
“There’s something about this guy that is justspecial.” Leviev tells Fjellhoy he’s CEO of LLD
Diamonds, a role he inherited from his father,
Lev Leviev, a man Forbes once called the
“King of Diamonds” – which is why Leviev
styles himself “Prince of Diamonds”. He scrolls
through his phone for images that back up his
stories: the Forbes cover shot of Lev Leviev, a
casual family shot of Lev with his arm slung
around his “son’s” shoulder.
When Leviev is not dazzling Fjellhoy with
stories of his professional status, he tells her
about the daughter he shares with an ex, about
how lonely his jet-set lifestyle makes him,
and how much he longs for a connection with
someone. In other words, he bombards her
with a semblance of intimacy, a semblance of
trust, which invites her to trust him in return.
Fjellhoy spends barely an hour with Leviev,
yet feels deeply connected to him. When, at
the end of the date, he tells her he’s flying
to Bulgaria for business on a private jet that
evening and asks if she would like to come,
Fjellhoy agrees. The two sleep together that
first night, and embark on what Fjellhoy
takes for a giddy, intense love affair, one which
escalates quickly over three months, thanks
in no small part to the amount of time Leviev
and Fjellhoy spend apart while he flies around
the world on business trips, exchanging loving
voice notes and text messages all the while.Fjellhoy experiences it as intensely
romantic in its uncertainty, its spontaneity,
in the bittersweet pang of constantly
missing someone. All of which is ramped
up considerably by Leviev telling her that,
because of the nature of the diamond business,
the high stakes and multimillions in play,
he is often subject to threats of violence, and
periodically has to go underground on the
advice of his security team, led by a personal
bodyguard called Peter.
In March 2018, Leviev asks Fjellhoy to
move in with him, and charges her with
finding a flat for the two of them to share in
London. She tours high-end properties,
showing Leviev around them on FaceTime.
He tells her she has a budget of $15,- around £11,000 – per month to play with.
Then, in April 2018, barely 12 weeks after
their first date, while Fjellhoy is out for drinks
M
The text reads only
‘Blood.’ He claims he’s
been attacked by his
enemies and needs
to use her credit cards
Second victim Pernilla Sjoholm, now 35PREVIOUS AND THIS SPREAD: JOSHUA WILKS/NETFLIX, FACEBOOK/SIMONLEVIEVOFFICIAL