Review | Netflix movie review: The Tinder Swindler – true-crime documentary offers fascinating account of Simon Leviev’s dating apps-aided spree of theft, forgery and fraud
- Simon Leviev cheated a string of women he met on dating app Tinder out of a combined US$10 million. Felicity Morris’ riveting documentary shows how
- As successive victims of his charm and spiel are revealed her film becomes ever more engrossing and unbelievable. The ending will leave viewers divided
4/5 stars
“Don’t you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty?” purrs Marilyn Monroe in the 1953 classic Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. “You might not marry a girl just because she’s pretty. But, my goodness, doesn’t it help?”
“It’s true,” concedes Cecilie Fjellhøy, one of dozens of women who have fallen foul of the elaborate scams of Simon Leviev, also known as The Tinder Swindler.
Fjellhøy met Leviev on Tinder in 2018 and was swept off her feet by the handsome, sophisticated and apparently enormously successful young man. He invited her for coffee at his five-star London hotel, where he asked Fjellhøy to join him on a business trip to Bulgaria that same day.
Once in Sofia, Leviev told her that he worked in the diamond industry and was the son of Lev Leviev, the so-called “King of Diamonds”. His job took him all over the world making multimillion-dollar deals, but it could also be extremely dangerous, forcing him to travel everywhere with a personal bodyguard.
For mild-mannered Fjellhøy, smooth-talking, sensitive Leviev was the Prince Charming she had been searching for. Before long, she would discover that everything he had told her was a lie, but not before he had cheated her out of US$250,000 in loans and credit card debt that she had no way of repaying.