"The Tinder Swindler"
Bribe, Swindle or Steal
Alexandra Addison-Wrage of TRACE International
4.9 • 582 Ratings
🗓️ 31 January 2024
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Investigative journalist Erlend Ofte Arntsen of Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang joins the podcast to discuss his work on the Tinder Swindler story, adapted into a Netflix documentary. Erlend and his colleagues broke the story of Shimon Hayut, an Israeli con man who found women on the dating app, impressed them with private jets and bodyguards, concocted stories about being in great personal danger and then drained their bank accounts and left them with extraordinary credit card debt.
This episode originally aired on February 15, 2022.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel. |
| 0:09.3 | I'm Alexandra Rogge and today we're trying to take a financial crime angle on Valentine's Day |
| 0:14.8 | and we're talking about the Tinder Swindler story. It was recently adapted into a popular Netflix |
| 0:20.6 | documentary. My guest is Erlund |
| 0:22.8 | Offte Arnsson. He is a U.S. correspondent for Norway's VG newspaper and he was on the reporting |
| 0:28.9 | team that broke this story. Erland, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having you. |
| 0:33.8 | For our listeners who haven't read the story or seen the documentary yet, can you walk us through the SEGA? |
| 0:40.4 | It's really a stunning story and the work that your team did on it was phenomenal. |
| 0:46.6 | So I'd like to just hand this over to you. |
| 0:48.6 | I could maybe start off with where me and my colleagues, Natalieen and Christopher Kumar come into the picture. |
| 0:54.8 | So we need to go back to June of 2018. |
| 0:58.5 | I was getting ready for the summer holidays, actually, |
| 1:00.6 | but there was an email that landed in my inbox. |
| 1:03.4 | It was a tip-off to our newsroom from a Norwegian woman. |
| 1:06.7 | She was living in the UK, and she had quite a stunning story to tell. |
| 1:10.7 | She had the last previous in the months before, the UK and she had quite a stunning story to tell. She had the last previous |
| 1:12.3 | in the months before, the winter and spring of 2018. She had become romantically involved with a |
| 1:18.3 | person named Simon Leviov. She mentioned private jets and fancy cars, but more than that, |
| 1:24.1 | he had traveled around with team pretending pretending to be diamond billionaire's son |
| 1:28.3 | and a CEO of this big diamond company. But in the end, after a few months, she had ended up |
| 1:33.4 | with a two million crown, Norwegian crown. That's about $250,000. And she also mentioned that |
| 1:40.9 | this has happened because he had claimed to be in some kind of danger and |
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