Conned by my Tinder boyfriend
Cecilie fell in love with Simon, but it turned out he was a professional fraudster…
Cecilie Fjellhøy was swept off her feet when she met Simon Leviev on the dating app Tinder. He claimed he was the CEO of a diamond company and lived a lifestyle of fancy restaurants, fast cars and luxury holidays.
‘Simon had this magnetism,’ says Cecilie, who lives in London. ‘I thought, “There’s something about this guy that’s special.” It felt like being in a movie.’
In danger
But everything changed when Simon rang Cecilie from Amsterdam claiming he was being threatened over a diamond deal worth millions. He said he couldn’t use his credit cards in case his enemies tracked him down and killed him. ‘He asked if he could use my cards for a while instead,’ says Cecilie. ‘Of course I was going to help him, I was his girlfriend. I thought his life depended on it.’
However, within weeks Cecilie had racked up debts of $250,000. Simon promised to pay her back but, unknown to Cecilie, he was secretly using her cash to fund a luxury European tour with another woman. At her wits’ end, Cecilie eventually discovered from her bank that Simon was a professional fraudster with multiple different names, and that everything he’d told her had been a lie. In this documentary, Cecilie tells her story along with Pernilla Sjoholm and Ayleen Charlotte, two of Simon’s other victims. Together they helped orchestrate Simon’s arrest and saw him serve five months of a 15-month sentence in Israel. ‘I can’t even describe the joy. I needed justice,’ says Cecilie, who’s still paying off Simon’s debts. ‘But I still can’t understand how someone can be so evil.’