“Tinder Swindler” victim Pernilla Sjöholm has a message for fans of the Netflix hit: It could happen to you, too.
“It could happen to anyone who has empathy,” she exclusively tells Page Six of being conned by Simon Leviev.
“Those are the ones that they [grifters] target. Someone, for example, who doesn’t have empathy, he [Leviev] has a disorder. He doesn’t feel empathy. So for a person like me and Cecilie [Fjellhøy] … [we] have a lot of empathy for other people. We are very easy targets.”
Swedish ex-sales employee Sjöholm met the Israeli Leviev — who changed his name from Shimon Hayut to pose as the son of a wealthy diamond merchant — after matching with him on Tinder in Stockholm in 2018. They developed a platonic relationship that spanned months before Leviev contacted Sjöholm with tales of being in danger from “enemies” and desperately needing cash.
Sjöholm with two of Simon Leviev’s other victims, Cecilie Fjellhøy and Ayleen Charlotte.Joshua Wilks/NetflixMonths later, Sjöholm came to find out that Leviev had conned her and other women, like Fjellhøy and Ayleen Charlotte, out of thousands of dollars he used to fund an extravagant lifestyle.
And yes, Sjöholm, 35, understands why some who watch the documentary can’t understand how she and the other women fell for Leviev’s increasingly outlandish tales of violence and attempted kidnappings.
She admits that before her experience with Leviev, when she would read about scammers, “My first thought would be like, ‘Oh my God, if you’re that stupid, just blame yourself.’ And I’m really embarrassed to say this. But this is how I used to be thinking before, and [I’m] now realizing that it really can happen to anyone.”
Leviev allegedly scammed women to fund his extravagant lifestyle.Shimon Hayut/FacebookSjöholm says she is still traumatized by the swindle.
“I’m not as bad as I was in 2019, and now I can feel like I have a little bit of trust in people,” she reveals. “But still, if someone does something really nice to me, it can still pop up in the back of my head. Like, [is] this an evil agenda? And I don’t want to be like that.
“But I always say I have good times and bad times in my life, and now they’re more good than bad, but I’m still traumatized from everything that happened.”
One good thing to come from the ordeal: her close friendship with Fjellhøy.
“She’s like my best friend and my soulmate,” Sjöholm explains. “We sometimes say that we sit on so many nights and just think, ‘What if this had never happened to us? We would never have met.’ I mean, like, what would we change?
“Not that I want this to happen to anyone, but I mean, otherwise I wouldn’t have met my best friend. So sometimes I want to think, all the bad things that happen in your life, they happen for a reason. I know it sounds so goofy. So we make this joke so that you can put a price on friendship, but we can see the exact amount.”
Sjöholm, Fjellhøy and Charlotte have also set up a GoFundMe page to help with their crippling debts after numerous offers of help from viewers — and, ironically, because scammers were setting up fake fundraisers in their names.
Leviev was expelled from Greece in 2019.AFP via Getty ImagesMeanwhile, Sjöholm is still coming face-to-face with Leviev, who has been in the news again for signing with a Hollywood agent, something Sjöholm finds “so weird.”
She was also upset by a recent interview in which he denied defrauding women and claimed he was merely a “single guy who wanted to meet some girls on Tinder.”
“He just genuinely doesn’t care about anyone besides himself,” she says. “You can hear him talk even now in the interview. ‘This has been very hard for me’ — it’s just ‘me, me, me.'”
Leviev was eventually arrested in 2019 after using a forged passport and sentenced to 15 months in jail in Israel for previous fraud charges. He was released after serving five months.
