The constant messages, the photographs, the gifts at home and the daily calls continued after that sporadic encounter. Within a few weeks it turned into a love affair, and this relationship cost Cecile dearly, as she loaned him an estimated $200,000 that she never repaid.
Simon Leviev swindled women and used that money to lead a life of luxury, excess and farce. Cecile’s case was not the only one and the documentary shows testimonies of more women, including Pernilla Sjoholm: a Swedish woman who became her great friend. She lent him the savings with which she planned to buy her apartment: 400,000 Norwegian kroner (approximately US$45,400). She never got them back.
The Norwegian outlet VG was the first to investigate the case in 2019 and revealed that Simon Leviev’s original name was Shimon Yehuda Hayu, born in 1990 in Tel Aviv, into a middle-class ultra-Orthodox family.
He escaped to Europe in 2011, as he was being hunted by the Israeli police for fraud. However, he came back in 2017 and managed to legally change his name to Simon Leviev to fake his relationship with a billionaire.