why the tinder swindler was not a psychopath.

The short version

Simon Leviev was not a psychopath. He was a con artist running a parasitic financial operation, and the difference is the mechanism underneath the same surface behavior. A psychopath has a deficit in affective processing, a constant flat affect and shallow charm that show up even with nothing to gain, because the wiring is constant. Leviev calibrated. He read his victims with precision, tracked their emotional states and timed each escalation, because their feelings were the raw material of the scheme. He didn’t lack empathy. He chose not to use it when it conflicted with profit, which is a moral failure and a common one. Calling him a psychopath turns a calculated fraud into a neurological anomaly and lets everyone off the hook.

• A psychopath’s flat affect is a constant condition, while Leviev’s behavior was transactional and target-specific down to the minute.
• His love bombing was a business expense, with the private jet as proof of concept and the five-star rooms as set dressing.
• The operation required project management across multiple simultaneous relationships, the opposite of psychopathic impulsivity.
• Elijah in Going Under runs a parallel cold precision, defeating a detection system built on the assumption that people eventually break character.

Simon Leviev stole an estimated ten million dollars from women he met on Tinder by pretending to be the heir of a diamond empire. He love-bombed them with private jets and five-star hotels. He manufactured a fake crisis involving enemies in the diamond trade. He convinced his victims to hand over their credit cards so he could “avoid leaving a digital trail.” Then he disappeared.

The internet called him a psychopath. Psychologists on podcasts and in op-eds agreed, pointing to the superficial charm, the lack of remorse, the pattern of manipulation. The diagnosis became the explanation. Simon Leviev psychology articles piled up, all reaching the same conclusion: this man is a psychopath, and that’s why he did what he did.

I think the diagnosis is wrong. And I think the error reveals something about how badly we misuse clinical language when a person scares us.

A psychopath has a specific internal architecture. The clinical literature describes someone with a deficit in affective processing. Psychopaths don’t feel fear the way other people do. Their autonomic nervous system responds differently to threat cues. The emotional flatness isn’t a strategy. It’s a neurological condition that shapes every interaction the psychopath has, whether or not there’s anything to gain from it. A psychopath at a dinner party with nothing to gain will still present the same flattened affect, the same shallow charm, the same inability to connect. The behavior is constant because the wiring is constant.

Leviev’s behavior was nothing like that. Leviev’s behavior was transactional down to the minute.

Watch the Netflix documentary closely. Leviev didn’t charm everyone he met. He charmed specific women on a specific platform with a specific profile designed to attract a specific type of target. He didn’t lack empathy across the board. He read his victims with extraordinary precision, tracking their emotional states, knowing exactly when to escalate intimacy and when to introduce the crisis narrative. Cecilie Fjellhoy described the early phase of their relationship as overwhelming in its attentiveness. Leviev remembered details. He mirrored her emotional needs. He calibrated.

A psychopath doesn’t calibrate. A psychopath doesn’t need to. The psychopath’s advantage is that they don’t care, and that indifference frees them to act without hesitation. Leviev’s advantage was the opposite. He cared intensely about what his victims felt, because their feelings were the raw material of his scheme. Every romantic gesture was a deposit in an account he planned to drain.

Love bombing gets thrown around as a symptom of personality disorders. Narcissists love-bomb. Psychopaths love-bomb. The framing suggests that love bombing is an expression of pathology, a thing that leaks out of a disordered personality the way sweat leaks out of a fever.

Leviev’s love bombing didn’t leak out of anything. Leviev’s love bombing was a business expense.

The private jet wasn’t a compulsive display of grandiosity. The jet was proof of concept. Leviev needed his targets to believe he was wealthy before he could tell them his wealth was under threat. The five-star hotel room wasn’t narcissistic excess. It was set dressing. The bodyguards and the entourage weren’t compensating for insecurity. They were props in a theatrical production that required the audience to buy a specific premise before act two could begin.

This is a con artist’s structure. A con artist builds a world, inhabits it long enough to extract value and then exits. The personality traits that make a good con artist overlap with psychopathy on the surface, the charm, the lying, the apparent indifference to the victim’s suffering, but the underlying mechanism is different. The psychopath’s lying is effortless because deception costs them nothing emotionally. The con artist’s lying is a practiced skill that serves a financial objective. One is a condition. The other is a profession.

Leviev ran a Ponzi scheme with romance as collateral. Each new victim funded the lifestyle that would attract the next victim. Pernilla Sjoholm’s money paid for the dates that seduced the woman after her. The scheme required sustained, deliberate performance across multiple simultaneous relationships, each one carefully managed to stay at the right stage of the extraction cycle. Psychopaths are impulsive. They have poor behavioral controls. Leviev’s operation required the opposite of impulsivity. It required project management.

Elijah, in Going Under, operates on a parallel frequency. He is a data entry clerk who has been invisible for twenty-seven years. When Elijah decides to perform a version of himself for institutional benefit, the performance is precise and calculated. Elijah’s internal world runs on exact measurements. The system Elijah enters was designed to detect deception, and Elijah fools it, because sustained performance executed with enough patience will defeat any detection system built on the assumption that people eventually break character.

Leviev fooled systems too. He fooled banks. He fooled the women closest to him. He fooled an entire apparatus of digital trust that Tinder’s verification and credit card companies and hotel concierges all participated in. The systems assumed that a person presenting consistent evidence of wealth over an extended period was, in fact, wealthy. Leviev understood that assumption and built his entire operation around it.

The difference between Leviev and Elijah is what the performance costs other people. Leviev’s performance was parasitic. Cecilie Fjellhoy ended up $250,000 in debt. Pernilla Sjoholm lost $65,000. Ayleen Charlotte lost $140,000. These women’s financial lives were destroyed so that Leviev could maintain the set dressing for the next target. Elijah’s performance carries a different kind of weight, one the reader discovers on their own terms.

Calling Leviev a psychopath lets everyone off the hook. It turns him into a monster, a neurological anomaly, someone whose brain is wired wrong. The comfortable version. The version where normal people don’t do things like this.

The uncomfortable version is that Leviev is a man who made a series of rational, calculated decisions to build a parasitic financial operation using romantic attachment as the mechanism of extraction. He didn’t lack the capacity for empathy. He chose not to use it when empathy conflicted with profit. That’s a moral failure, and it’s a common one. It’s the same failure that drives fraud in every industry. The person committing it understands the harm. They’ve decided the harm is acceptable.

Psychopathy is rare. Greed and the willingness to rationalize harm to others are not rare at all. Leviev served five months in a Finnish prison and two months in Israel. He’s back on Instagram. He’s selling cameos. The world didn’t treat him like a dangerous neurological case. The world treated him like a guy who got caught and moved on. That should tell you something about which diagnosis fits.

Common questions

Was the Tinder Swindler a psychopath?

No. Simon Leviev was a con artist, not a psychopath. A psychopath has a constant deficit in affective processing that shows up even with nothing to gain. Leviev’s behavior was transactional and target-specific, calibrated to each victim, which is the opposite of the constant flat affect that defines psychopathy.

If Simon Leviev isn’t a psychopath, what is he?

A con artist running a parasitic financial operation. He built a world, inhabited it long enough to extract value and then exited. His charm and lying served a financial objective rather than leaking out of a disordered personality. That is a practiced profession, not a neurological condition.

Why does the psychopath distinction matter for the Tinder Swindler?

Because calling him a psychopath turns him into a monster whose brain is wired wrong, the comfortable version where normal people don’t do this. The uncomfortable truth is that he made rational, calculated decisions to profit from romantic attachment. He understood the harm and decided it was acceptable.

Why was Leviev’s love bombing not a sign of pathology?

Because it was a business expense. The private jet was proof of concept, needed so targets would believe he was wealthy before he claimed his wealth was under threat. The five-star rooms and the entourage were props in a production the audience had to buy before the extraction could begin.