Film Review: "The Tindler Swindler" (2022).

"Modern love is a dangerous game" in The Tindler Swinder. This crime documentary film directed by Felicity Morris. Posing as a wealthy, jet-setting diamond mogul, he wooed women online then conned them out of millions of dollars. Now some victims plan for payback.

Simon Leviev, or actually known as Shimon Yehuda Hayut, is a professional hustler and came from a humble background in Tel Aviv, Israel. At the age of eighteen, he fled Israel after becoming wanted for fraud. He was accused in 2011 of stealing cheques from an employer. He didn't attend his court date and left the country on a forged passport. In 2015, Simon served three years in a prison in Finland for aggravated fraud. Under various names, he had stolen money from three women after claiming he was in the weapons industry and a Mossad agent before getting cash from them. He was then sent back to Israel, where he fled again before his court date and changed his name to Simon Leviev in 2017, claiming to be the the son of 'King of Diamonds' billionaire, Lev Leviev. As the title suggests, Simon would often meets his targets on Tinder, catching their interest with a profile boasting a five-star lifestyle. He would romance his targets, spending thousands on romantic gestures. After a couple of months, he pulled the rug out from under them, saying he was in trouble due to the dangerous nature of the diamond industry. He would then request the women give him a credit card temporarily in their name, he would promise to pay her back, but before that he needed to stay under the radar and off-grid for fear of his life. Believing he truly had the cash after what they had experienced with him, and scared for his safety, the women would oblige. Sometimes he would pay back some of the charges as a mark of good faith, but mostly he would forge bank transfer receipts, claiming he'd sent the money and blaming the bank for failing to conduct the transaction. Over the years he became wanted in more than seven countries for the scheme, but proved almost impossible to trace. In the film, Simon's method was described as a pyramid scheme. He would take money from a girl in one city to pay for his dalliances in another. In 2019, he was ultimately arrested in Athens after traveling to Greece on a fake Israeli passport. Simon was last known to be living free in Israel after serving only five months of a fifteen-month sentence for the crimes he committed. After his release, he launched a business mentoring website. He still lives an extravagant lifestyle which he boasts about online.

The story of Simon Leveiv and the victims he left in his wake is so outlandish and disturbing that it does make for a fantastically engrossing and entertaining film.

Simon says The Tindler Swinder receives: