The Tinder Swindler – Netflix- 2 February 2022

"I have the right to choose whatever name I want, I never presented myself as the son of anyone, but people use their imaginations. Maybe their hearts were broken during the process… I never took a dime from them; these women enjoyed themselves in my company. They traveled and got to see the world on my dime,"

Simon Leviev

"Any Swipe Can Change Your Life

Tinder Slogan

"How can you give trust to a man like that, who escaped from Israel twice? A man that deceived and swindled women in Europe for hundreds of thousands of euros. Where is the justice?"

Pernilla Sjöholm

The Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler is a British true crime documentary film directed by Felicity Morris and was released on Netflix on 2 February 2022. It is about how convicted fraudster Simon Leviev (sentenced in Finland and Israel), an internet dating scammer, cheated hundreds of women out of 10 million dollars. Leviev ran a basic Ponzi scheme, using new women's money to fund his fake billionaire lifestyle. It derives its name from the Italian Charles Ponzi, who ran a system in the early 1920s that extorted almost $200 million dollars (in 2022 currency). Ponzi schemes have only become more popular over the past century.

While it is a basic human trait to feel for the underdog or, in this case, the scammed women, I find it hard to muster sympathy for several women who fell for such an obvious confidence trick. It beggars belief that these women fell in "love" with this cold-blooded con artist with a reptilian worldview. The Tinder Swindler trod a fine line when it romanticised the exploits and fabrications of this con artist. The documentary does not condemn his criminal behaviour despite the devastating personal and financial harm he caused.  

The first woman we meet is Cecilie Fjellhoy, who talks about falling for a man she met on the Tinder dating app. He called himself Simon Leviev. Despite her friends warning her that this could be a scam, she boarded his private jet and was fed at a five-star hotel. It did not yet dawn on her that this lavish lifestyle was paid for by a long line of women that had been conned before her. Her scammer claimed to be the son of a billionaire diamond dealer but was a convicted conman named Shimon Hayut. Fjellhoy was fleeced to the tune of 250,000 dollars

The second woman interviewed was Pernilla Sjoholm. Like her friend Cecillie she does not exactly cover herself in glory in this documentary. She does not fall in love with Leviev but becomes his friend, and when she is invited to spend a summer travelling with him, she jumps at the chance. The only problem is that Simon's then-girlfriend will accompany them. Her story ends the same way as Cecillie's. However, she did not lose as much.

The story only gets really interesting when the story finally becomes public after an in-investigation by the Norwegian newspaper VG. While you must admire the bravery of the women involved to go public, they faced several rather accurate charges of being in love with money. The newspaper story went viral and showed the huge extent of his deception.

Netflix's true-crime documentaries are usually strong on visuals and excitement and can be sensationalist but largely unsatisfying. At no stage did the Netflix documentary examine the personal psychology of a con artist like Leviev. While The Tinder Swindler is  fun and good to look at, as one reviewer said, "Despite the great yarn at its centre, [the film] sometimes lapses into the self-indulgence common to so many modern documentaries, with endless shadowy reconstructions and a heart-tugging soundtrack." It leaves a lot of unanswered questions and barely scratches the surface of what is a billion-dollar business.

Why did it take Tinder so long to ban him, given they are not slow in banning the ordinary Joe public without recourse to an appeal? The writer of this article was also banned, and maybe they got wind of my writing this article. Currently 31 years old, Simon Leviev lives as a free man in Israel and is dating Israeli model Kate Konlin. He has an Instagram account.

The Tinder Swindler unwittingly exposes the connection between middle-class aspirations and the fake identities constructed on dating platforms such as Tinder. But as Christopher McMichael states, "this technology exists against the backdrop of neoliberalism, with its Darwinian ideology of competition and wealth accumulation at all costs. In this culture, dishonorable or dishonest practices are now called "hustling" or "grinding" – the ends of more money and power are seen to justify the means."

Leviev's Tinder profile shows an image of material wealth, and the women attracted to this wealth were hooked before Leviev even opened his mouth. As the journalist Christopher McMichael again explains, "Historically, con artists have also been known as grifters or snake oil salesmen, referring to the selling of fraudulent products. Capitalism has long produced criminal entrepreneurs prepared to tell lies for a quick buck. In the early 19th century, Scottish adventurer Gregor MacGregor convinced European investors that he had exclusive control of a territory in South America called Poyais. But instead of a bustling settlement, Poyias did not exist, and many of his victims who came to live in the promised utopia died in the jungle."[1]

It is perhaps a little perverse that The Tinder Swindler's portrayal of the con artist reveals the true nature of the capitalist system. The way to make millions is not through the American dream but "subterfuge, class power and exploitation".

To conclude, Leviev's crimes are many and varied but are not the product of just a bad individual but are part of a broader process that has been going on for decades. Leviev's criminality is not an aberration but shows the true face of capitalism in the 21st century. The accumulation of wealth and assets has completely detached itself from the real economy for a long time. The result is unprecedented social polarisation and the criminalisation of all sectors of the capitalist economy. Leviev's criminality is but one bizarre expression of the criminality of capitalism.

---

[1] https://www.newframe.com/fake-it-then-make-it-how-con-artists-capture-us/ 

Love, Janessa (BBC World Service) | BBC Sounds

 Love, Janessa is a BBC World Service and the CBC seven-part podcast investigating probably the biggest romance scam ever. At its height, over 100,000 people were being scammed out of millions of Pounds.

Journalist Hannah Ajala hosts the podcast. The podcast tells the story of a porn star, Janessa Brazil, whose photos have repeatedly been used to scam people. Ajala talks to numerous victims who have been conned out of hundreds of thousands of pounds/dollars. Many of these victims maintain they spoke to the real porn star

As the program states, there was not just a handful of scammers using Janessa's picture but hundreds. Janessa's images were readily available on the internet and on her private porn site. At no time did the people scammed out of large amounts of money do an image search that would have immediately told them they were being taken for a ride.

During the podcast, it becomes apparent that this is not a very sophisticated scam. There's a bit of sweet talk, everyday flirtation followed by demands for money, mainly car repairs, to mend a broken phone or hospital costs. As the con develops, the amount of money demanded grows larger. To be fooled by this deception, you must be either stupid, gullible, or both. Unfortunately, thousands of men have been fooled by this low-brow scam.

Apart from the real Janessa, (see left) the show's star is Roberto, an eco-entrepreneur from Sardinia who reportedly handed over $250,000 to various scammers in Ghana. He is treated with utmost sympathy by the show's host. Not once was his staggering level of stupidity challenged. Not content with handing over large amounts of money to scammers, he traveled the world waiting at airports hoping to meet the real Janessa, who would never turn up. Again at no point was this high-level delusion challenged, let alone condemned. Roberto was not the only person scammed to hop on a plane to look for the love of his life. A Nova Scotian divorcee got on a plane to Ghana to meet the  man of her dreams,

Most scams connected to the porn star Janessa were based in either Nigeria or Ghana. The British journalist Hannah Ajala, currently based in Ghana, met and interviewed one of the many romance scammers, known locally as "Sakawa boys".These scammers are professional criminals and are a major part of a billion-dollar industry. These Sakawa boys have multiple scams on the go at once, and they keep a spreadsheet to keep track of the lies he tells their victims. His wife and children know nothing of his work. Ajala treats these criminals with a courtesy they don't deserve as if they were some kind of celebrity. The podcast's conclusion is a bit of anti-climax as everybody lives happily ever after.  

 

Sweetheart Scams: Online Dating's Billion-Dollar Swindle- by Clarence Jones Paperback – Oct. 15 2020

This is useful if a limited, guide to the massive growth of "romance scams". They say love is blind, and scammers are cashing in on people's stupidity and gullibility. According to data published by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2016, scammers stole more than a billion dollars in the United States alone, which is a conservative estimate.

Clarence Jones's book is a step-by-step guide on how scammers work and how to avoid getting caught. Jones is an investigative reporter and seems to be a one-man publishing industry. Jones spent years investigating online dating services. Much of what Jones found is not new. Online dating websites, since their inception, have been a haven for scammers and a clever way for escorts or prostitutes to ply their trade without prosecution. Specialized websites are helping husbands and wives cheat on their spouses. These websites are an online version of a pimp who manages escorts and prostitutes.

Most hookup sites are nothing more than a license to print money, and most sites are interactive pornography. Most, if not all, profiles are fake, and in reality, you are probably talking to another computer in the form of  "bots", which generates massive profits for its owners.

In 2020 I wrote a series of articles on one aspect of this nasty scam which has conned many people out of millions. After two years of research, certain things can be said to warn others. The first job of a scammer who proliferates the various online dating sites is to get their prey off the original dating website and onto sites such as Gmail and WhatsApp. Gmail is a favorite hunting ground for your African scammers, and it is a simple scam.

They send you a picture of a gorgeous voluptuous woman, usually lifted from a porn site. Most men think, yum, I am in here. They don't ask why this beautiful 25-year-old woman would have anything to do with a balding middle-aged man. Unperturbed most men would want to see this hot girl on video chat. This is the first part of the scam. To see this beautiful woman, you need to purchase an Amazon card or other such items for them to get an internet connection for the video call.

When they finally agree to your demand to see them in the flesh, you do not see the beautiful young thing in the flesh, but a rather clumsy video these amateurs have somehow managed to upload onto Gmail. On one occasion, I could see the real person behind the scam as his hand slipped, revealing his real identity, and he was not a gorgeous blonde woman.

Jones looks into Facebook's role in allowing scammers to operate with impunity. Facebook launched their dating app in 2019. This free dating app was a means by which Facebook sought to promote the launch of its digital currency Meta. Facebook is riddled with fake profiles. In the first quarter of 2022, Facebook removed 1.6 billion fake accounts, down from 1.7 billion in the previous quarter. In 2019, 2.2 billion counterfeit accounts were removed in one quarter alone.

These gorgeous-looking Asian women were not interested in dating. They used Facebook to lure punters into a Cryptocurrency scam. They would take your money, saying they will invest it in Cryptocurrency. The reality is that they take the money and run along with their uncles. It was amazing that all these girls had fantastic relatives willing to help others get rich. When yours truly threatened to report these scammers, he received some very nasty death threats and one ugly video threatening DECAPITATION. Facebook turned a blind eye to the whole scam. After all, many of these Asian scammers were promoting Facebook's digital currency, Meta.

The levels of criminality surrounding dating websites, an industry worth billions of dollars, are not separate from the criminality of the capitalist system itself. Scammers are not just a collection of random criminals; as Jones points out, they are well-organized and systematic, and it is big business.

 

 

 

 

 

Insolent proceedings-Rethinking public politics in the English Revolution-Editors: Peter Lake and Jason Peacey-Manchester University Press-2022

 

"The third part of Gangræna. Or, A new and higher discovery of the errors, heresies, blasphemies, and insolent proceedings of the sectaries of these times; with some animadversions by way of confutation upon many of the errors and heresies named. ... Briefe animadversions on many of the sectaries late pamphlets, as Lilburnes and Overtons books against the House of Peeres".

"Study the historian before you begin to study the facts".

E H Carr

"Cromwell built not merely an army but also a party -- his army was to some extent an armed party and herein precisely lay its strength. In 1644 Cromwell's "holy" squadrons won a brilliant victory over the King's horsemen and won the nickname of "Ironsides." It is always useful for a revolution to have iron sides. On this score, British workers can learn much from Cromwell." 

Leon Trotsky

"I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself."

Michel de Montaigne

Insolent proceedings is a collection of interdisciplinary essays by scholars examining the last fifty years of the historiography of the English revolution. The essays honour the work of Ann Hughes, who is, in the opinion of the editors of this book, a post-revisionist historian. The main bulk of the essays deals with revisionist and post-revisionist scholarship. It remains to be seen if the claims made by the scholars to be developing a new historiography away from the revisionist and post-revisionist historiography can be substantiated.

The opening chapter offers a substantial overview of the previous historiography of the English revolution. Although it reflects on the debates of the last fifty years, it steers clear of an evaluation of both Whig and Marxist historiography.

The great historian Edward Hallett Carr was fond of saying, "Study the historian before you begin to study the facts."[1] In this case, it is important to understand the politics of the historian whose honour these essays are written.

It was recently announced that Hughes would be a Labour Party candidate in the next election. The Uk Labour Party's latest purge has almost cleared out any nominally left-wing members and is now an openly right-wing bourgeois party. Hughes feels at home with this party. It is a complex process, the relationship between politics and history, and it is dialectical. While Hughes's politics may have to a certain extent, coloured her historical writing, she is nonetheless a serious historian, and serious historians play an objectively significant role in social life as the embodiment of historical memory.

While it is not in the realm of possibility to examine every chapter in this book, some chapters are more important than others. Anatomy of the General Rising-Militancy and mobilisation in London, 1643 discusses the significant move to the left in both the New Model Army and the general London population to deal with the King once and for all and defeat the Presbyterians in Parliament, who were seeking to bring back the King to power and destroy the Independents. David Como examines the 'General Rising' using unknown manuscript accounts. His article examines what happened along with the class nature of the participants.

David Lowenstein's chapter William Walwyn's Montaigne and the struggle for toleration in the English Revolution is intriguing detective work. It examines why Montaigne, the great French Catholic writer and sceptic, appealed to the radical writer and Leveller leader William Walwyn.

As Lowenstein shows, Montaigne was an attractive figure for Walwyn, one of the left-wing leaders of the English bourgeois revolution. Montaigne writes, "I propose a life ordinary and without lustre: 'tis all one; all moral philosophy may as well be applied to a common and private life, as to one of richer composition: every man carries the entire form of the human condition. Authors communicate themselves to the people by some especial and extrinsic mark; I, the first of any, by my universal being, as Michel de Montaigne, not as a grammarian, a poet, or a lawyer. If the world find fault that I speak too much of myself, I find fault that they do not so much as think of themselves."[2]

Walwyn wanted to assimilate all that was good about Michel de Montaigne. Many of the revolution's ideologists, such as Walwyn, used the bible and read other writers, such as Michel de Montaigne, to half understand the historical precedent and for some theories to explain what they were doing.

Sean Kelsey's essay Indemnity, sovereignty and justice in the army debates of 1647 is disappointing. Given the extraordinary amount of new material uncovered about the huge radicalisation of the New Model Army, it would appear that the revisionist and post-revisionist downplaying of the radical nature of the New Model Army has raised its ugly head. The important work by John Rees on the radicalisation of the New Model Army is ignored completely. The NMA was not just an army but was a political party in all but name as the Marxist writer Leon Trotsky once wrote, "In this way, Cromwell built not merely an army but also a party -- his army was to some extent an armed party and herein precisely lay its strength. In 1644 Cromwell's "holy" squadrons won a brilliant victory over the King's horsemen and won the nickname of "Ironsides." It is always useful for a revolution to have iron sides. On this score, British workers can learn much from Cromwell." [3]

Thomas N Corns groundbreaking essay Milton and Winstanley A conversation reviews the possible but unproven interconnections between the giants of 17^th-century literature and politics Milton and Winstanley.

'Threshing among the people Ranters, Quakers and the revolutionary public sphere re-examines relations between Quakers and Ranters in the 1650s. J. C. Davis' right-wing attack on the Ranters in the 1990s was largely discredited by the work of Christopher Hill and A L Morton, whose work is largely ignored in this book.

J  C Davis's book Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians was the right-wing Kenneth Baker (education secretary under Margaret Thatcher's government) favourite book. According to Davis, the Ranters were impossible to define. What they believed in, he writes, "There was no recognised leader or theoretician and little, if any, organisation. The views of the principal figures were inconsistent with each other".

Ann Hughes's work has been important in re-establishing the importance of a systematic study of radical groups. But perhaps more importantly, she has fought to highlight the role of women in the English revolution, which has been largely ignored by most of her male counterparts.

After all, the world was turned upside down for women as much as men. As Alison Jones points out, "The Civil War of 1642-1646 and its aftermath constituted a time of great turmoil, turning people's everyday lives upside down. It not only affected the men in the armies, but it also touched the lives of countless ordinary individuals. It is well known that women played a significant role in the Civil War, for example, defending their communities from attack and nursing wounded soldiers. What is often forgotten, however, is that some women took advantage of the havoc wrought by the conflict to dissent from conventional positions in society. The slightest deviation by women from their traditional roles as wives and mothers was condemned by this patriarchal society. Therefore dissent could take many forms that today do not appear particularly extreme – for example, choosing to participate in emerging radical religious sects, having greater sexual freedom, fighting as soldiers and practising witchcraft".[4]

 

 

 

---

[1] What Is History.

[2] Michel de Montaigne, Selected Essays, ed. W. C. Hazlitt (New York: Dover, 2011), 172.

[3] Two traditions: the seventeenth-century revolution and Chartism- https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/britain/ch06.htm

[4] Dissent and Debauchery: Women and the English Civil War- Alison Jones