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00:09Why do women always fall for the rich guy?
00:12Even when there are a lot of red flags, he's a total fraud.
00:15This guy is just having a very different life than I ever will experience.
00:20The Tinder Swindler tells the unbelievable true story
00:23of how Simon Levive pretended to be the son of a diamond billionaire
00:27to seduce women and get them to fund his expensive lifestyle.
00:31Would it be possible for me to borrow $30,000
00:34and make a bank transfer while I'm on the phone with him?
00:37Surprisingly, after the film came out,
00:39the women he targeted faced a lot of criticism,
00:42as viewers felt they shouldn't have fallen for what seemed like an obvious scam.
00:46But in recent years, there have been many examples of similar romance scammers
00:50who use the promise of money and status to dupe women into relationships.
00:54The corrupt Italian surgeon Paolo Maccarini,
00:57who convinced journalist Benita Alexander their wedding would be officiated by the Pope.
01:01Richard Scott Smith, who posed as a successful real estate developer and pilot.
01:05Or John Meehan, aka Dirty John, who lived the lie as a successful anesthesiologist
01:10in order to defraud designer Deborah Newell.
01:13Well, he's a nurse and he has advanced anesthesiology training.
01:18People lost $1.3 billion to romance scams between 2017 and 2021,
01:24with total losses increasing each and every year.
01:27So what is it about a seemingly wealthy man that blinds so many women to the facts in front of their eyes?
01:33Private jets, cool cars, amazing parties all over the world.
01:40It's not fair to blame these victims or simply assume they're shallow and materialistic
01:44when there's a much bigger cultural problem at play here.
01:47Don't you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty?
01:52You might not marry a girl just because she's pretty.
01:55But my goodness, doesn't it help?
01:57Here's our take on how our culture has sold women a false dream of the luxurious Prince Charming,
02:03and whether we can collectively get over this dangerous fixation on the rich guy allure.
02:12The allure of the wealthy guy is deeply rooted in our culture.
02:15Classic Disney films, some of the first stories kids come into contact with,
02:18repeat the pattern of humble maidens obtaining an exciting, luxurious existence through marrying a rich prince.
02:24I've never seen so many books in all my life.
02:27You, you like it.
02:28It's wonderful.
02:30Then it's yours.
02:31Cecilia Filhoi, one of the Tinder Swindler's victims,
02:34even cites Beauty and the Beast as the kind of story she grew up wanting to emulate.
02:38I had memorized the entire Beauty and the Beast cassette.
02:41It just sticks with you, like the feeling of a prince coming to save you.
02:46Meanwhile, money inspires trust in us.
02:49Psychologist Dr. Penny Sue Loras attributes this to the halo effect,
02:53which posits that if we see one positive quality in someone, such as wealth,
02:57we'll instinctively fill in the gaps.
02:59Quote,
03:01If we know someone successful, we might also assume they must be intelligent, fair-minded, and politically savvy.
03:06Just reading about him, you really got the sense from him that he wanted to help people, that he wanted to help humanity.
03:11So scammers like Simon Levive play act a wealthy lifestyle in order to project an aura of importance.
03:17When Simon first meets Cecilia, he whisks her away on a private jet.
03:21I thought that I would be stupid if I said no.
03:23While also acting very busy with urgent work.
03:26He starts getting a lot of calls.
03:28By investing in creating a first impression of ultra-elite status, he quickly earns a woman's trust and affection,
03:34so that even after obvious red flags pop up, she's primed to still believe in her initial image of him.
03:40You trust me and I trust you, so of course we can help each other. It wasn't even like a question.
03:45Pernilla, another featured victim in the Tinder Swindler, doesn't romantically fall for Simon like Cecilia,
03:50but she's still convinced of his authority because his story seems to check out online.
03:55You always Google everyone you're supposed to go on a date with. His father is this diamond tycoon.
04:02And since he treats her to the perks of his lavish lifestyle before asking for anything,
04:06that authority appears confirmed to her. Dirty John uses a similar technique to convince Deborah Newell,
04:12first making claims online and then backing them up with apparent evidence in person,
04:17like turning up to functions in his medical scrubs and acting authoritative about his line of work.
04:22He said everything right. I liked what he had on his profile. He had his daughters, he had animals, that he was an anesthesiologist.
04:33Journalist Benita Alexander first met Paolo Maccarini, the subject of the Doctor Death podcast's third season,
04:39on a documentary being made about him. So again, this authority he had from the start of their relationship completely shaped how she saw him.
04:46He had this nickname that he was a rock star surgeon and the super surgeon.
04:51I think that came from the fact that he was willing to take risks. He was a cowboy.
04:55Bad Vegan tells the story of a stranger romance con, how Anthony Strangis convinced successful restaurant owner Sarma Melngelis
05:02to wire him over a million dollars, using otherworldly narratives like that he would make her dog immortal.
05:07But again, she trusted him in part because he made her believe he was very rich,
05:12and she thought he was legit because he seemed connected online to her famous friend Alec Baldwin.
05:17So much of the Tinder swindler's scheming happened online, he wouldn't have been able to create the illusion of wealth without social media, for example.
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06:28In addition to all the rich guy worship, our culture bombards us with stories
06:34about successful but broken men who yearn for a good woman to save them.
06:39She is this small-town girl like me, hoping for something bigger.
06:43She meets this person, then she saves them in a sense.
06:47In Fifty Shades of Grey, hot, wealthy tycoon Christian Grey is privately a suffering mess,
06:52so he chooses regular girl Anna because only she gets how to fulfill his emotional needs.
06:57Anna taught me how to love.
06:59In About a Boy, Will is financially set for life, but his life is empty
07:03until he takes on a quasi-parental role to a boy named Marcus
07:06and meets his love interest Rachel.
07:08I was in deep trouble, and there was only one person who could help me out.
07:14In Indecent Proposal, billionaire John Gage is so captivated by Diana
07:18that he offers her one million dollars to spend the night with him,
07:21but he can't buy her heart away from the husband she really loves,
07:24and we're left with the sense that a good woman's love is worth more
07:27than all the money in the world.
07:29She never would have looked at me the way she did at him.
07:32At the end of The Social Network, the irony is that Mark Zuckerberg has built extraordinary wealth
07:37with a social network that supposedly brings people together but is completely alone himself,
07:43refreshing his own website for updates about his ex-girlfriend.
07:46And similarly, in Cinema Paradiso, Toto may be a successful filmmaker
07:50who's romanced a string of beautiful women,
07:52but he still feels empty and pines over his young love Elena, the one who got away.
07:57But he didn't say it for evil. He was a brave Christian.
08:02Who knows what happened to us in the last few years?
08:09In The Tender Swindler, Simon skillfully manipulates his victims
08:12into seeing themselves in this female savior role.
08:15Simon pretended he had everything financially,
08:18but the other piece of his narrative was to appear vulnerable so the woman could help him.
08:22I wanted to ask you a favor.
08:24If you have an American Express credit card, you'd like to link it to my account.
08:29The part of Simon's scam that's become the biggest joke is the constant vague talk about his enemies
08:34and the photograph of his beaten up bodyguard, Peter, to convince his marks he's under threat.
08:39Peter is down.
08:40He sent exactly the same pictures to me, telling me that his enemies had beaten Peter up.
08:48But while it seems funny from the outside, by this point in the relationship,
08:52his victims are completely ready to step into that familiar cultural narrative of becoming his rescuer.
08:57As long as the internet has existed, there have been scams defrauding people with the promise of making them rich.
09:05Once every hour, someone is involved in an internet scam.
09:10That man is Michael Scott.
09:12A lot of them seem obvious if you step back and think.
09:15Maybe I should feel weird about giving a stranger my social security number, but the guy's a Nigerian prince.
09:22But people fall for these scams because they play on emotion, appeal to our biases,
09:27and apply pressure to rush us into split-second decisions.
09:30One of the reasons romance scams work so well is that dating apps already create a similar environment.
09:35Obviously, people bring strong emotion to the prospect of finding love or attraction,
09:40while quick swiping and fast-paced conversations encourage instant decisions.
09:44A 2016 study also showed that Tinder users had lower self-esteem and more shame around their bodies,
09:50so these apps create a vulnerability there to be exploited.
09:53The most important thing that you can have is a picture of your face,
09:56and then you have a picture with friends,
09:58because it's important to show that you're social as well.
10:00Forensic psychologist Dr. Joni Johnson writes,
10:03It's emotions and unmet needs that make us vulnerable to romance scams, not logic.
10:08It's not how smart we are, it's how successful we are at preventing our feelings from driving our decisions.
10:13Simon Levive hooked his victims with the textbook Love Bombing playbook,
10:17showering them with expensive gestures and sweeping them off their feet with fast declarations of commitment.
10:22Cecilia, my love, I love you. I miss you. I really miss you.
10:25So they'd feel too attached to respond rationally when he suddenly became demanding and distant.
10:30To this day, despite the huge reach of the Tinder Swindler documentary,
10:33Levive is apparently continuing to leverage the smoke and mirrors of the internet to project his image of luxury
10:39and find women willing to trust in him.
10:42I know this monster that everybody has created.
10:45They weren't conned and they weren't threatened.
10:48Even when the internet's not involved, the rich guy's money can easily be used as a smokescreen for getting away with bad behavior.
10:55So stop worrying and let me spoil you.
10:58It's documented that high-earning men are more likely to cheat.
11:01Blue Jasmine's story of a Bernie Madoff-esque financial crook and his wife who looks the other way
11:07captures how wrong it often is to blindly put our faith in wealthy men
11:11while looking down on working class men who make an honest living.
11:14God, don't you want to meet some decent man?
11:17You know, he's sexy and he doesn't steal.
11:20As Tinder Swindler and all these other stories show us,
11:22worshipping money and lusting after luxury are not the ideal tenets of romance
11:27that we should be subscribing to in this day and age.
11:30We're at a tipping point when it comes to the rich guy in our culture.
11:33Not only can a performative, lavish lifestyle feel completely out of touch in today's unequal environment,
11:38My earring's gone!
11:40There's people that are dying.
11:42but we're also becoming more discerning about where a lot of that wealth has come from.
11:46Billionaires themselves aren't the problem.
11:48The real failure is in how our economy is organized.
11:52There's something telling about the fact that the Tinder Swindler's most popular hero
11:56was probably Eileen, his victim, who retaliated by taking direct, gleeful financial revenge.
12:02So you're still selling his things now?
12:05Yes, I'm still selling his things.
12:07The rich guy may once have been the ultimate prize,
12:10but now it feels like we're ready to see him get taken down.
12:14The prince of diamonds to this homeless king.
12:17Cry me a river.
12:20Thank you for watching The Take.
12:22Don't forget to subscribe and let us know what you're watching.
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