Cecilie Fjellhøy as featured in Netflix’s The Tinder Swindler.
NetflixJust ahead of Valentine’s Day, Netflix‘s true crime documentary The Tinder Swindler is here to showcase one of the ultimate examples of online dating gone wrong.
The Tinder Swindler, now streaming on Netflix, tells the story of a man named Simon Leviev (born Shimon Hayut) who used the online dating platform to meet women, lure them with a lavish lifestyle of real private jets and fancy hotels (and a made-up fake identity involving being the son of the CEO of a diamond company) and eventually con them into giving him money via credit cards and loans.
Online romance scams aren’t uncommon. In September, the FBI reported that its Internet Crime Complaint Center had received more than 1,800 reports relating to online romance scams in 2021 alone. Those complaints accounted for about $133.4 million in losses for people deceived by scammers.
After realizing Hayut was a grifter and losing hundreds of thousands of dollars, the three women featured in the documentary — Cecilie Fjellhøy, Pernilla Sjoholm and Ayleen Charlotte — set out to try to put an end to Hayut’s scams by working with law enforcement and journalists from a major Norwegian newspaper called VG.
Here’s an update on Fjellhøy, Sjoholm, Charlotte and Hayut.
Shimon Hayut/Simon Leviev
The documentary reports that after being arrested by Interpol in July 2019, Hayut was sentenced to 15 months in jail for crimes committed in Israel. He only served five months, however, and was released because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
After his release, the documentary said, Hayut started a website offering business advice, and from his social media accounts, didn’t seem to be hurting for money. He’d even been seen back on Tinder. That’s no longer the case, though. The dating app said it banned Hayut from its platform.
“We have conducted internal investigations and can confirm Simon Leviev is no longer active on Tinder under any of his known aliases,” Tinder said in a statement. The Independent reported Monday that Hayut deleted his Instagram account. The documentary estimates Hayut has managed to swindle about $10 million from people around the world.
Hayut wasn’t reachable for comment.
Cecilie Fjellhøy, Pernilla Sjoholm and Ayleen Charlotte
The documentary showed the lengths Cecilie Fjellhøy, Pernilla Sjoholm and Ayleen Charlotte went to in working with journalists and law enforcement to catch Hayut and ideally prevent him from taking advantage of other women. At the end of The Tinder Swindler, the latest update on the trio was that they were still trying to pay off their debts. In an interview with British GQ, Sjoholm said she was bankrupt and living with her mother. Over the weekend all three created a GoFundMe page with a goal of raising £600,000 ($811,206).
“The past few days have been a whirlwind, and we three (Ayleen, Pernilla and Cecilie) have been completely shocked and floored by the flood of compassion and support from everyone,” they wrote in the fundraiser description. “All we want are our lives back.”
