Not all shows and movies on Netflix are produced by a Movie Producer. The American subscription streaming service and Production Company, Netflix, often chases and shoots its own movies, and when they do, most are a hit.
One among many such hits is ‘The Tinder Swindler’. This investigative documentary has been ranked a good 4.7 star on Google, confirming it is a great watch. It is Directed by Felicity Morris and distributed by Netflix.
In a nutshell
A group of women who were the victims of a dating app based swindler join together in an attempt to hunt him down and recover the millions of dollars that were stolen from them.
The Guardian summaries for us, “Several women meet a man on Tinder who claims to be the Billionaire heir to an Israeli diamond fortune, lavishes them with attention, flies to them on actual private jets, and then swindles them for hundreds of thousands of dollars? I’m a single woman in my late 20s in New York: of course, I ate it up. The documentary was also much, much better than it could have been; I appreciated that Morris didn’t have much interest in probing the psychology of its swindler, Simon Leviev. Instead, she foregrounded three women’s first-person accounts of getting conned – why they believed him, why they cared for him, what such manipulation and confusion does to someone – as well as the Journalists at the Norwegian paper VG who unspooled his lies for an initial exposé in 2019.”
What does this tell us about the internet?
While what Simon Leviev did was very much a catfish, there could be Millions of people trying to deceive their lifestyle over the internet by faking images or by editing them carefully. This documentary based on real-life events warns us about how there could be many out there doing the same, maybe to a smaller degree than showed on the show – but still deceiving. The internet is a powerful tool that can be
Awareness while being an Influencer
Norway is said to have implemented a rule where edited images show a message on them saying “this image has been edited”. Many news sources have picked up this announcement but realistically – we don’t see it being implemented. A rule as such would have stopped an entire scandal, the likes of people like Simon Leviev. For a credible source to read this on, click here.
Diving in deeper
The Norwegian newspaper daily, VG (@vgnett) has done a story series on The Tinder Swindler, as they were the ones who the victims, namely Cecilie Schrøder Fjellhøy of Lillestrøm and Pernilla Sjoholm got in touch with. VG travels to Simon’s home country of Israel to look for him. Beforehand, we had received help from the well-respected Investigative Journalist Uri Blau to find out more about who Simon really is. See the PDF compiled by VG here.
(Update: We have tried reaching Cecilie and Pernilla to give us quotes on this subject, and are waiting for their responses.)
While Simon Leviei was said to be sentenced jail for 5 months only, and as of this day, is free of charge and lives openly as a resident of Israel. Many anticipate his Instagram account to be @simon__leviev__official_____.
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