This Netflix documentary tells of an Israeli conman who swindled several EU women out of large amounts of money. He’d meet them on Tinder, pretend to be a billionaire, promise marriage and babies, and then experience “temporary financial problems” that would necessitate the girlfriends’ assistance.
When the women figured out what was happening and went to the police, it became clear that nobody would ever prosecute the fraud. The crook was hopping all over the EU. Which jurisdiction should prosecute him? No borders means no policing for criminals who move fast enough. As a result, the Tinder Swindler is living it up in Israel and continuing his cons.
What really got to me, though, is the story of one of his victims, a Norwegian woman called Cecilie. She’s been on… guess how many Tinder dates.
Over 1,200.
Then, she met the Tinder Swindler. And now she’s back on Tinder.
The crook weaseled $250,000 out of her. She’ll be indigent her whole life. And she still says, “But why not? It’s not Tinder that caused the problem!”
1,200 men. There’s no likelihood that they were all bad. You hear about consumer mentality in dating but then you see a case like this, and it’s downright scary.
An excellent documentary that is disturbing and funny at the same time.
Clarissa's Blog 
True life Tinder story, it’s something (in Russian):
я ждал это время и вот это время пришло
https://division—bell.livejournal.com/2016042.html
And one reaction to the story:
https://elsa-gandler.livejournal.com/47767.html
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Meeting a person one could be happy with is very easy. It’s creating that happiness and making it last that is hard. Many people think that their endless relationship fails are due to them not having met the magic pill (aka “the right person”). So they keep looking and dating and fussing and schwitzing. When the reality is that they just simply are deeply infantile and don’t understand what a relationship actually is.
My most heartfelt advice to people who want to form a family is this: stop choosing and start putting in the work. Just commit and decide to stick with it no matter what.
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And I need to add this. My husband and I have lived through the death of our child, unemployment, addiction, threats of deportation, debt, crappy in-laws, long-distance relationship, immigration troubles, severe childhood trauma, cultural differences, and a war between our countries. Do you know how easy it would have been to go the route of “this is not the right person”? Very easy. I fail to think of another couple who would have been visited with all these calamities. Usually relationships fall apart because of just one or two of these things. But we are 17 years in, and passionately in love. This isn’t magic. This is knowing what’s right and doing what’s right. Which is often very VERY hard. But it’s the only way.
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Amen! We’re coming up on 15 years, not all of those years have been great (postpartum depression was pretty hard on both of us), but for the most part, the greatness of our marriage can be calculated in the number of tricky situations we’ve navigated together.
A few nice old ladies told me, before I ever even thought of marriage, that it wasn’t all sunshine, and that if you’re married long enough you won’t always *like* each other or be totally thrilled with marriage. BUT, love is a decision not a feeling, and you can decide to keep on with the love, even when things aren’t going well… and “in love” is a thing that you can fall out of, and back into a lot of times in the course of a long marriage. The important thing is that everybody’s trying to make it work.
I took it to heart, and the few times when things were looking really grim, for a few months or a year (but it seemed like an eternity), I held onto that insight very tightly, trusting that if I could just stick it out, this temporary thing would pass, and we’d be back to the good side. And they were totally right. Not only do you come out the other side into a good relationship again, but it’s better than before because we’ve both learned and grown and become… I dunno. Stronger people? It feels like growing up, but that seems silly to say when we’ve been adults the whole time.
The idea that everything is, or needs to be, perfect from the start and a million models to choose from… I think it has infected the dating market and it’s a disaster. I don’t know *anyone* currently married, who met on Tinder. It’s not a dating market, it’s a hookup market, so if you’re looking for a spouse that’s the wrong place. I know lots of people who met online and got married, but the main venue seems to be religion-specific chatgroups these days, and more than half of the younger couples I know are relocating very long distances to get married… which suggests the pool of marriageable young people is shrinking to desperately small proportions.
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Love is a decision, absolutely. And understanding that a life-long unmarred bliss is an impossibility is the starting point.
I particularly like the expression, “it didn’t work out.” Who is this mysterious “it” and how was “it” supposed to work things out?
We have a very, very messed up understanding of what love is. And it’s causing a lot of heartache. The women in the show keep saying, “I thought it was true love because he gave me the most beautiful bouquets. It was like a 24/7 party.” These are adult women in their thirties. And they have absolutely no idea that love has nothing to do with parties or bouquets. And even after this horrible experience, they still learned nothing. They are still looking “for the right person”. It’s scary to see.
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And also, the ups and downs are what makes it so fascinating. You learn so much about yourself, the other person, and the nature of relationships. It’s the slow, complicated weaving into each other that’s so precious.
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That’s what it is– it is not growing up so much as adapting to each other, becoming more of a unit.
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You also keep discovering very unexpected things. For instance, I could have never imagined that having a healthy, living child would be harder on the relationship (but obviously not on us as individuals) than having a stillborn child. We had been together for a long time and had gotten so used to being each other’s biggest love, that suddenly having a person we both loved more than each other was a shock. I never knew such feelings even existed, and suddenly they were there. And also, there was the realization for both of us that our mothers didn’t love us this way, and that’s another thing you are trying to process while nursing a colicky baby and trying to understand who you now are.
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“stick with it no matter what”
I agree that committing to making it work is necessary and 1,200 Tinder dates is ridiculous, but “no matter what” might be a little too far. I am sure we have all known people in relationships they would have been better off getting out of.
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I think there are very uncontroversial places to draw such lines. They aren’t at “I’m unhappy and bored”. More like “my spouse is gay” or “I need to protect my children from my spouse” –everybody thinks this is an abusive-dad problem, but I have actually seen it more often with moms :(
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And when that happens, I suggest a long, solitary pondering of what made you end up in this relationship in the first place. Because otherwise you’ll just keep re-creating the same problem. “I’m an angel and he’s a bastard” is a recipe for future relationship failure. This is how you know if a divorced person is ready for something new. When asked why they got divorced, they talk about their failure and what caused it. Unless you can say, “we got divorced because I messed up”, you aren’t ready.
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Yes, from what I’ve seen, recreational drugs are a great way to meet regrettable romantic partners… you might grow up and get over the drugs-are-fun phase, but that guy/gal is *never* going to grow up out of being bipolar, or borderline, or a total jackass.
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How does this suggestion look for someone who is leaving an abusive relationship? And does it matter if the relationship is physically abusive or just emotionally/financially abusive.
“We got divorced because I messed up and failed to appease my abusive spouse’s arbitrary whims so he insulted me, repeatedly”?
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I got married off against my will when I was basically still a child. And even I found a much greater agency to explain the demise of my first marriage.
If a person marries an abusive individual, plays the abusive game for months or even years, isn’t it a good idea to ask oneself, how did I end up here? Why did I choose this person? What attracted me to this setup? Instead of “why did he insult me?”, which is passive and infantile, ask, “why did I enjoy being insulted for so long?”
As for emotional or financial abuse, that does not exist among adults. In a parent – child relationship, absolutely. But among adults, it’s not abuse. It’s an S&M game.
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knowing what’s right and doing what’s right
No one could have put it better.
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A quarter million won’t hire much of a “recovery team”, which is the current acceptable euphemism used to describe wetwork teams, but maybe if she joins resources with two dozen other such women …
Watching the breach team work in the Netflix sequel sounds a lot more entertaining than this sordid sob story.
So how did she let this arrant hobbit holster a quarter large of her holdings without her noticing who is really holding the bag?
But 1200 dates … yes, yes I am absolutely “slut shaming” for that …
HO! :-)
This could be a highly entertaining series especially if those 1200 dates decide some “asset recovery” sounds like a way to win.
Get Jeffrey Donovan to do the voiceovers “Burn Notice” style.
“When the flashbang goes off, it’s usually too late to react unless you were expecting it. Having a good perimeter defence won’t keep you from getting breached, but it gives you options for responding to the breach.”
Admit it, you’d rather watch this. :-)
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