The swindle is on – get ready for TV’s latest obsession
Forget serial killers, it’s dastardly scammers that will soon dominate our screens. By Eleanor Margolis
EA lot of these stories deal with abusive men using vulnerable women
arly on in the pandemic, back when we were all baking sourdough and taking part in Zoom quizzes, another slightly less wholesome trend was on the rise. Last year, consumer rights group Which? reported that 60 per cent of Brits had been targeted by delivery scam texts.
And I was one of the 60 per cent. Texts claiming to be from Royal Mail were lighting up my phone screen every other day, asking me to pay an extra fee for a missed delivery.
On top of that, about once a week I was receiving a call supposedly from Carphone Warehouse (where I’ve never had an account). Other scams get really elaborate. Thousands of people in the UK last year were tricked into transferring money to a criminal after he had phoned them up, pretending to be from their bank’s fraud team and convinced them the security of their account had been compromised.
And then there are the romance scammers. Some might sneer at the gullibility of those scammed by Israeli conman Shimon Hayut, the subject of the new Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler. But Hayut, as the film reveals, is a little more than your average catfish. Posing as Simon Leviev, the son of billionaire Russian-Israeli diamond mogul Lev Leviev, Hayut treated the women he met on Tinder to flights on private jets and what appeared to be their yearly salt quota in caviar.
Add to this romantic gesture after romantic gesture, and promises of a future together, and, to quote BoJack Horseman – a very different Netflix show – “When you look at someone through rose-coloured glasses, all the red flags just look like flags”. The women were eventually conned out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now they have come together to expose his crimes.
The Tinder Swindler, along with Netflix’s The Puppet Master –a docuseries about another romance scammer, Derbyshire-born Robert Hendy-Freegard – is part of the latest trend in true crime. To put it extremely crassly, con artists have taken the place of murderers. Last year Tortoise Media’s hit podcast series Sweet Bobby – about a British woman who spent her thirties in a relationship with a man who didn’t exist – had us hooked on lies.
In 2020, podcast The Dream provided a deep dive into pyramid schemes, and the (mostly) women who exploit other women. Back in 2019, we had not one but two whole documentaries about Fyre, the disastrous Bahamas music festival, and the fraudsters behind it. And, this year, Netflix is to release Inventing Anna, a drama based on the true story of fake heiress Anna Delvey who dazzled New York society and was convicted of multiple counts of fraud in 2019.
But how did we get so addicted to con artists? A great deal of their hold on us boils down to their chutzpah. There’s something fascinating about seeing just how big a lie somebody can tell, before they get caught. Tinder Swindler Hayut dressed in designer labels, rarely took off his sunglasses and looked generically rich without having any real style
– a regular at Salt Bae’s London restaurant, if you will. But this is an image he carefully cultivated to draw in more and more marks for his multi-million dollar scam.
Hendy-Freegard, the subject of The Puppet Master, was a car salesman masquerading as an MI5 agent. There’s a real silliness and bathos to these cons – and yet this is only something we can see with hindsight. And this hindsight is the exact thing these true crime series allow us. They also – satisfyingly – let us see the con artists’ downfall. There’s nothing quite like seeing a liar confronted with their lies. We get to see them squirm and writhe, the power hissing out of them like air out of a punctured bouncy castle.
Watching what is essentially a Hogarthian morality tale play out – for real – is almost quite comforting in this post-truth age, where the biggest liars so rarely face consequences. Hayut flew too close to the sun, in a private jet. Without giving too much away, the consequences he faced were nothing like severe enough. But now – thanks to a handful of his victims bravely coming forward – we can hope that an entire
Netflix documentary about him being a conman might get in the way of any future cons. Although beware, because we do see Hayut – at his lowest point in the documentary – considering changing his face with plastic surgery.
As ridiculous as they may seem to us, these stories of deception must not be taken lightly. What is often at play is emotionally abusive men taking advantage of a particular type of naturally nurturing woman. In The Tinder Swindler, the women’s search for love is genuine. What they’re met with from Hayut is everything but. Conmen are often truffle pigs for vulnerability. They have an uncanny ability to find the weak spot in everything, be it a person or an entire financial system. Seeing this skill in practice is gruesomely fascinating.
“This is quite rare, to have men listen,” says Swedish woman Pernilla Sjoholm, recalling her first date with Hayut. Hayut played on the difficulty so many women have finding men who are attentive and caring. Quickly, he made his victims feel loved. The expensive trips and meals were one thing, but, watching The Tinder Swindler, you never fully get the sense these women were with him for his money. They saw him as a real-life Prince Charming, and their feelings for him were gutwrenchingly real. Real enough for them to help Hayut out of a fabricated and dramatic bind by maxing out credit cards for him, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. As pointed out by one of the women he swindled, coming to someone’s rescue financially is hardly the behaviour of a gold digger.
It’s unfortunate, in a sense, that we find people like Hayut so fascinating. They thrive on their intrigue. And it’s tempting to apply every bit of pop psychology to them; they’re psychopaths, they’re sociopaths, they’re narcissists. In this frenzy of amateur diagnosis and analysis, we mustn’t forget just how vulnerable we all are to manipulation. And therein, perhaps, lies another reason for our fascination with con artists. To varying degrees, we all feel we’ve been taken advantage of at some point. The story of a fraud isn’t just one about the size of the lies people can get away with – it also calls into question just how huge and monstrous a lie we could believe ourselves, if we really wanted to.