‘Tinder Swindler’ prosecutor alleges alleged fraud in Netflix doc

It only took one pass and Cecily Fejilhoy was hooked.

After moving from his native Norway to London, Fjellhoy used the dating app Tinder to search for love. She said she didn’t know at the time that things “were going to happen like this, very, very badly, so quickly”.

The man she met introduced himself as Simon Leviev, an Israeli-born heir to a billion-dollar diamond fortune who led an extremely luxurious lifestyle that sounded like something out of a fairy tale to Philhoy. Introduce him to a world of private jets and luxury restaurants.

“He was confident, but I felt like he was a regular funny guy too,” she told CBS News foreign correspondent Imtiaz Tayeb during her first morning TV interview in the States. -United.

Fjellhoy said the fairy tale quickly turned into a living nightmare. After about six weeks of dating, Leviev is calling for help – and soon Fjellhoy will be losing thousands of dollars to a scam that has attracted attention on both sides of the Atlantic.

She is one of three women whose stories are told in Netflix’s hit documentary Tinder Swindler. All three say they met Shimon Hayut — Leviev’s real name — on Tinder and cheated on them.

Hayut dated or befriended several women, then told them his life was in danger and asked for money to get to safety, saying his accounts were being tracked. He is accused of defrauding various alleged victims of approximately $10 million.

The son of an Israeli-born rabbi, now infamous around the world as ‘Tinder Swindler’, received a modest upbringing in a Tel Aviv suburb that seemed too far removed from the lavish lifestyle he claims lead.

Fjellhoy said Hayut’s plea for help came first in an audio message.

“I want to ask you a favor if you have an American Express credit card,” he said in the letter. It is alleged that he and his bodyguard were attacked by someone he calls his “enemies”.

“I really thought he was in danger,” Fegiloy said, pointing out that he didn’t ask her for money at first.

“He needed my name to get under safely,” she said.

But Leviev demanded more and more.

“I wanted to support him,” she said. And it’s hard when everyone says, ‘Oh, if someone asked me to help them, I would run the other way. “But what kind of person would I be?

The Netflix documentary, “Tinder Swindler,” describes how Hayut ran his multinational fraud and manipulated victims into taking out bigger and bigger loans to him until they were left with nothing – financial or emotional – to offer.

“I think we knew this story had a sort of universal theme about love,” said Felicity Morris, the film’s director.

“To fight against yourself, I always feel like an act of weakness,” she said. “We are truly overwhelmed by the support and sympathy – the outrage of these women should not be blamed for what has happened to them.”

Morris said Hayut allegedly cheated people out of large sums of money for years and knows about 25 alleged victims.

Hayut was no stranger to the authorities. He had already spent two years in a Finnish prison for fraud before meeting Fjellhoy.

“One of the things he took advantage of was that he didn’t spend a lot of time in any country,” former federal prosecutor Fred Davis said.

“I don’t know if the UK, Norway, Sweden, [the Netherlands]None of these countries really pay enough attention to men. It’s a classic cross-border crime and it’s very common.

Hayut was eventually arrested in 2019, convicted of fraud unrelated to Fjellhoy and only spent five months behind bars. The 31-year-old now lives as freely and, according to his Instagram page, as lavishly as before.

Following the success of the documentary, he is now working with a talent agency based in Los Angeles.

For Filhoy, the renewed interest was overwhelming. Some critics and other accusers called them “gold diggers”.

“We heard it before, in 2019,” she said. “It’s a blame and shame game for the victims here, and we laugh about it. We are the worst “gold diggers” in the world. I think if Simon Leviev had been around the right prospectors and asked for help, they never would have helped him.

Hayott denied the allegations in an upcoming interview with “Inside Edition,” which airs Monday night.

“They basically took everything, manipulated and added elements to make it a very one-sided story,” Hayut said. “Basically just to destroy my name and destroy everything. Just to make me look like such a freak.

Fjellhoy said she was scammed out of more than $200,000, plus interest, and was now nearly $300,000 in debt. Despite everything that’s happened to her, she’s not giving up on dating apps.

“I’m still on Tinder because I don’t blame Tinder for it,” she said. “I think Tinder was one of the ways he knew he could manipulate and use his skills in that way.”

Fjellhoy said she couldn’t give up on love either.

“I’m a very loving person and I love people and I just want him and I didn’t want him to take that away from me,” she said.

Tinder told CBS News that he banned Hayut from the dating app in 2019 after learning about his alleged scam.