She never intended to be famous. Cecilie Fjellhøy was just a normal girl from Norway, who moved to London in the 2010s to get a Master’s degree—and perhaps even find ‘The One’.
Having grown up on a Disney-fied diet of love and romance, Cecilie thought Simon Leviev could be her handsome prince when she matched with him on Tinder. However, their whirlwind, fairytale romance—private jets, luxury apartments, and dinners at fancy hotels—quickly turned toxic, with Simon (real name Shimon Hayut) scamming Cecilie out of a reported $250,000 through an intricate web of lies and deceit.
When Cecilie spoke out about her experience in Netflix’s hugely successful 2022 documentary, The Tinder Swindler, she instantly became recognizable—as did Simon. Now, Cecilie is looking to use what she learned in taking down Simon in her latest endeavor: a new Netflix docuseries called Love Con Revenge.
The series sees her team up with private investigator Brianne Joseph to try and help women who’ve also been swindled out of huge sums of money through complex romance scams (one episode sees a woman scammed out of over $2 million).
For Cecilie, the show is not about revenge, despite its somewhat direct title. “Love Con Revenge shows how difficult it is to get justice—and the media is an amazing way of getting this kind of justice,” she tells Cosmopolitan UK over Zoom. “I wanted to help others.”
Justice is something Cecilie feels she failed to receive after the Simon-shaped wrecking ball smashed through her life. Left bankrupt, and still being chased by banks and creditors, Cecilie’s mental health deteriorated to a place where she was having suicidal thoughts. She returned to Norway and was forced to spend time in a psychiatric facility.
“There are so many long-term consequences to romance fraud that people aren’t always immediately aware of,” Cecilie explains. “You have the mental health aspect, the lack of support, and the heavy burden of self-blame. You lose your confidence, as well as your trust in yourself and your instincts. You ask: ‘Am I worthy of love again?’ You’re battling all these things on top of financial destruction.”
There’s the intimate trust that’s shattered, too,” she adds. “In Love Con Revenge, one woman says she was in bed with the devil. That’s really what it can feel like.”
In spite of the serious consequences for victims, romance scams don’t necessarily invite sympathy from onlookers. Upon the release of The Tinder Swindler (a mammoth success for Netflix, which clocked up 166 million hours of viewing time in just one month), some blamed Cecilie, calling her a ‘gold digger’ or ‘naïve’. Meanwhile, more lurid corners of the internet championed Simon as a ‘manosphere hero’.
It didn’t surprise Cecilie, although she adds she was “mind blown” at how some people spoke to her. “These people are targeted by criminals,” she says. “We didn’t ‘give our money away’, someone stole our money from us. It was tough to be trolled, but, for me, it made it all the more important that I continued to fight for myself and others. Fraud is a societal issue, so we [need to] come together and look at it as a crime.”
It’s been cathartic, then, for Cecilie to help a number of other women who found themselves out of pocket due to romance scams. “While I was trolled, I got so many other messages from women who had been through something similar,” she says. “I thought, if I can just help some women and give them hope, then there is light at the end of the tunnel. Some people have told me that I’m inspirational because I’ve managed to thrive after a romance scam, and show others there can be life after being scammed.”
“[I hope I’ve] helped people realize their lives will go on,” Cecilie continues. “They will love again. Their lives might look different, but you might find another purpose in life.”
Cecilie adds that a benefit of filming Love Con Revenge—which investigates multiple romance scammers—was uniting women who’d been defrauded by the same man, and seeing them forge a community of their own. It’s not dissimilar to her own experience; Cecilie is now close friends with another of Simon’s victims, Pernilla Sjoholm. The pair have since written a book about their experiences, titled Swindled Ever After.
“I was shocked at what these women had been through,” she says of those featured in Love Con Revenge. “Scammers really are evolving. The extent they build their identities is shocking, and they really do exploit the trust of others.”
“In the scary world of deepfakes and AI, everything is being distorted. I always thought Simon was one in a million. But when I met these fraudsters on Love Con Revenge, I was like, ‘Whoa, Simon didn’t do that’. You know, Simon didn’t use a dead man’s memory and family to take their money. I want the power of these stories to really raise awareness for others who could be scammed, and how far [perpetrators] are willing to go.”
As for her relationship with her own scammer, Cecilie hasn’t had any contact with Simon since she confronted him in his home country of Israel in 2022. “He’s nothing to me,” she says.
However, that doesn’t mean Cecilie has given up on her dreamy ideal of love. While she has not been in a long-term relationship since then, she’s still on dating apps—although she does have a broken sense of trust, wary of the future-faking and love bombing typical of romance scammers.
But what Cecilie wants to see most of all is a real change in attitudes and severity of punishment towards scammers. After all, romance scams are on the rise—a study by Barclays Bank from earlier this year found a 20% rise in the crime this year, with one in 10 UK adults having been targeted.
“Romance fraud should be called manipulation abuse,” Cecilie says. “The laws aren’t fit for today, where huge amounts of money can be transferred instantly. Perpetrators aren’t getting harsh enough punishments, where they get a few years and then go out and offend again. We need to have this crime taken more seriously. Why should perpetrators get off scot free while the victims are left with all the responsibility? We need to see a major societal shift.”
