On Feb. 16, 2019, Ayleen Charlotte was boarding a plane in Prague, Czech Republic to return home to Amsterdam. She’d been visiting Simon Leviev, whom she’d been dating for 14 months. While waiting on the tarmac and scrolling through Instagram in her seat, she spotted Leviev’s picture attached to a multimedia article called “The Tinder Swindler” from the Norwegian newspaper VG. She downloaded it before putting her phone on airplane mode, then spent the flight taking it in. “He has seduced and swindled young women for millions and is a fugitive from justice in several countries,” the article read. “He finds his victims on the dating app Tinder and then seduces them with travel by private jet, luxury hotels and expensive dinners. They believe they are dating a wealthy businessman, but other women he has swindled are paying for the luxury.”
Charlotte had met Leviev on Tinder. She’d lent money to him, too — lots of it. “I gave him $140,000, so much money,” as she recalls in the new Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler, released on Feb. 2. In it, director Felicity Morris (who produced Don’t F**k With Cats) interviews two women who claimed they were victimized by Leviev, and the reporters who helped expose his alleged scams using the women’s messaging history, voice recordings of Leviev, videos the women had taken from their visits, and bank receipts. All together, it paints a sinister picture of a man manipulating women internationally for…
