Swindled
But now to the great dating swindle and the red flags for lovers and the media:
WOMAN: You can find a bit of everything on Tinder. One little swipe can change your life.
SONG: I only miss you when it rains …
CECILIE FJELLHØY: Immediately we had a bond …He needs cash — $20,000, $30,000.
AYLEEN KOELEMAN: One hundred 40 thousand dollars ...
CECILIE FJELLHØY: That’s when police tell me the man I love was never real. Everything’s a lie.
- The Tinder Swindler trailer, Netflix, 12 January, 2022
The Tinder Swindler — a doco on Israeli conman Simon Leviev and the women he fleeced through the dating app — was a global smash hit for Netflix last month.
London-based Norwegian Cecilie Fjellhøy was one of three women who told her story of deceit and despair. And recently she’s been busy retelling the tale as a warning to others:
LORRAINE KELLY: … how much money did he con from you?
CECILIE FJELLHØY: It’s over 200,000 pounds now. And these are high-interest loans, they’re still accumulating.
- Lorraine, ITV, 1 February, 2022
CECILIE FJELLHØY: … I wasn’t ashamed ‘cause I knew what I’d been through and I knew that it was horrifying …
- ET Canada, 4 February, 2022
CECILIE FJELLHØY: … you kinda can’t comprehend that the person you met was never your boyfriend, all the loving moments you had with them …
- The Morning Show, ITV, 9 February, 2022
So when Cecilie put up her hand for a chat to an Australian audience, The Briefing jumped at the chance.
The popular daily news podcast, produced by audio giants Southern Cross Austereo, made Cecilie their feature interview on 11th of March, with Katrina Blowers taking the call:
KATRINA BLOWERS: Thirty-three-year-old Cecilie Fjellhøy is one of Leviev’s victims — she was even thinking about moving in with him — and she joins us from Norway now.
… he looked pretty good on his Instagram, didn’t he?
CECILIE FJELLHØY: Yeah, he does and that’s what got me attracted to him because he’s my type …
- The Briefing, LiSTNR, 11 March, 2022
For 10 minutes Blowers teased out Cecilie’s heartbreak and how she’s putting her life back together:
CECILIE FJELLHØY: … I felt really, really disgusting, I felt like throwing up, I felt horrible inside because I don’t know how someone could be this evil and horrible …
… I’m still trying to pay my debts back and trying to start up my foundation. And also, no love right now but if love comes I’m going to hug it and I still want love …
- The Briefing, LiSTNR, 11 March, 2022
Blowers threw in her own stories of dating app disasters and, after thanking her guest, ended with this message for the audience:
KATRINA BLOWERS: And I guess the takeaway here is listen to your gut ladies and men. Haha. Cecilie wishes that she had seen those red flags sooner …
- The Briefing, LiSTNR, 11 March, 2022
Listen to your gut and look for red flags — in dating and in journalism.
As you may have noticed, Cecilie on The Briefing sounded absolutely nothing like the real Cecilie, who sounds like this:
CECILIE FJELLHØY: … it’s the victim blaming and shaming that we really wanted to be able to talk about …
- The Morning Show, ITV, 9 February, 2022
And when the real Cecilie was tagged on The Briefing’s Instagram page, she responded with the obvious question:
That is not my voice? What is going on here?
- Instagram direct message, 11 March, 2022
We don’t know if that’s the first hint The Briefing had that they themselves had been swindled. But we do know that two days later Blowers was back on air with this important update:
KATRINA BLOWERS: … we wanted to let you all know that we had to take down our Friday episode of The Briefing …
If you didn’t hear it, that was the interview about the Netflix series with one of the victims, or at least so we thought.
- The Briefing, LiSTNR, 13 March, 2022
So they thought. As host Tom Tilley, a former Triple J presenter, then explained:
TOM TILLEY: … turns out the person Katrina interviewed wasn’t the real Cecilie. And yes, we do realise the irony of this. Someone was impersonating her and our suspicion is that this imposter was trying to profit from the story, either through fake fundraising or paid media interviews. She asked us to pay her but we refused that offer and now that episode has been taken down. Bit of a wild one there.
- The Briefing, LiSTNR, 13 March, 2022
Wild is one way to describe it. An embarrassing cock-up is another.
Cecilie tells us — and yes, we checked — that the scammer took words straight out of her mouth:
… I can see … from the start that she’s been listening to my interviews and taken things I’ve said and re-used it.
- Twitter direct message, 18 March, 2022
It seems The Briefing producers set up the chat with a PR agency purporting to work for Netflix. And that agency is also a fake.
So who is the imposter? Why on earth did they do it? And why didn’t anyone on the show twig that the accent of the woman they were talking to was about as far away from Norwegian as you can get?
A Southern Cross Austereo spokesperson told us they are still investigating how it happened.
How very embarrassing. You really could not make it up.