3 hours ago
4
Well here’s a first, I think – a spin-off from a true-crime documentary starring the original victim as she goes about her new life as an avenging angel. Cecilie Fjellhøy fell victim to Simon Leviev, who would become known to the masses as the Tinder Swindler via a 2022 Netflix documentary of the same name. She lent $200,000 to a man she met online and considered her boyfriend, who appeared to be (and she did her due Google diligence) a billionaire member of the Leviev Israeli diamond dynasty. In fact, his real name was Shimon Hayut and his apparent wealth came from a string of women he had previously dated and defrauded. The film was nominated for five Emmys, is said to be Netflix’s most watched documentary, and the title has since become a byword for online scammers who practise manipulative and emotionally abusive “romance fraud”.
So many women (and a few men) got in touch with Fjellhøy to tell similar stories of their suffering at the hands of other seemingly loving men (and a few women), who then drain them of their resources and disappear, that she has become a crusader on their behalf.
The new six-part series Love Con Revenge follows her work with the private investigator Brianne Joseph (“I’m like a pitbull”) as they gather evidence for various clients that will force even the most uninterested of police officers (whose attitude on victims’ initial approaches tends towards “It’s a domestic matter, file a civil claim, I’m bored already”) to investigate. There is much to unpack about systemic misogyny and the dismissal of women’s stories and the crimes against them, but Love Con Revenge is more interested in action than attitudes or the reasons behind them.
Which is unfortunate because, in truth, there is not much action, at least of the televisual kind, involved in tracking down missing men and handing over dossiers of evidence to the police that mostly comprise documents provided by other victims of the potential scammers, or links found by tapping away at laptops for hours. Worthy work, but not a compelling watch.
Thus the series stretches its material very thinly. What could perhaps have made four relatively punchy hour-long episodes or six half hours grows repetitive and loses power over time. The women’s stories are sad and infuriating but also very similar (online connection, love-bombing, tragic backstories, desperation, loans repaid at first, then not, then guilt tripping until the victims are too enmeshed to escape), and the detail of each relationship is so minutely described that you start to glaze over.
There are also the laborious exchanges between Fjellhøy and Joseph, a number of which feel scripted, as they explain increasingly unnecessarily to each other and to us what they are going to do, what they are doing, and why. And the stories are oddly broken across episodes.
The initial case, of a man claiming he needs money from his girlfriend Jill, a woman with a personal interest in mental health and its treatment, to keep funding a wellness centre that never opens, ends halfway through the second episode. The next one runs from there into the third and there are other overruns that, with a firmer edit, could have easily been self-contained and much more effective.
The same goes for Fjellhøy’s repeated explanations of why she got into this line of work (if it is work rather than a righteous hobby – there is no mention of whether she, Joseph or the local PIs they engage are paid): she doesn’t want other people to suffer as she did; she wants to stop individuals who will otherwise carry on with impunity and maybe escalate their crimes. Admirable, but very much understandable the first time round.
Even the occasional promising moment ends up anticlimactic, like the handing over of the first dossier to the police. We don’t actually see the handover, and then the women sit in a car and wait until, four hours later, an officer comes out to tell them they will investigate and that a detective will call them. At the end of the second story, the confrontation between victim and scammer is only semi-satisfying because he more or less just walks away (“I don’t need to tell you anything”). That’s what happens in real life. And that’s why you should stay single for ever.
However – also happening in real life is Hayut existing as a free man in Israel, though he is facing a multi-million dollar lawsuit brought by the Leviev family for impersonation, defamation and invasion of privacy. And so I don’t doubt that one day soon we will be greeted with a film about what should be an interesting battle between furious claimants with unlimited funds to construct a legal net that may yet catch the slipperiest of fish. Justice cannot always be confined to fiction, can it?
