I recently watched the new Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler. If you haven't heard of it, I'll summarize it here fairly quickly: This documentary follows the stories of 3 different women, all of whom were swindled by a man they had met over Tinder - one woman lost $250,000 (taking out 9 loans to pay him), another $140,000.  How was this man able to convince these women to willingly send him money they didn't even have? Well this is how he ran his scheme: He would begin by meeting a woman online, pretending to be the CEO of a diamond company that his father owns. On the first date, he showers them with luxury - taking them on private jets, fancy restaurants, and hottest clubs. He then, over the course of a month or so, develops a stronger relationship with them (i.e. flying in to visit them when they're having a bad day, sending flowers, discussing things like moving in together, marriage, and children). So, of course, these women begin to trust him and fall in love with what seems to be this successful, wealthy, charming, and loving man who wants to treat them like queens. 

And once he realizes the hold he has on them, he pretends that he's in danger and that his enemies are after him. He tells the women that he can't use his own credit cards or transfer funds out of his own account because his security team is worried it'll allow his enemies to track it (or something like that). So he needs the women to help him by sending him some money, and once the situation with his enemies calms down, he'll repay them more than he borrowed. 

Now at this point this man is close enough to them that they feel they can trust him, and they've seen how much money he has, his jets and cars, and his designer clothes, so they have no reason to think that he won't pay them back. 

But does he pay them back? 

Yes. With fake cheques. 

Turns out, this man has no actual money of his own. What he's doing is essentially a Ponzi scheme, where he uses one woman's money to take out another woman, get that woman to trust him enough to give him money, which he then uses on another woman, and so on... 

There's more to documentary than that (and I recommend watching it to see how the women and journalists handle a matter that the police failed to take care of). But for the time being, I want to talk about something that has been on my mind throughout the entirety of the documentary:

Could I have potentially fallen victim to the Tinder Swindler? Or would I have refused to take out a loan and hand it over (along with my life savings) to a man that I've only known for about a month? 

It's very easy to say "of course not me! I'm too smart to be tricked! The women in the documentary were just naive"

But I'm not sure it's that simple. Sure, we like to all think that we're great at reading people, great at knowing people's intentions, and spotting red flags. A few online comments I came across read: "how could they not know that something that seems too good to be true often IS too good to be true?" 

But here's what I think is difficult to see from an outside perspective: these women thought that the man they loved was in danger. They thought that giving up their life savings and taking out loans to ensure his safety was a price worth paying. Their only "flaw" was being selfless, caring and empathetic. Imagine the same scenario, except the man who asked them for the money wasn't conning them - he actually was in danger. Would we not think they were absolutely horrible human beings if they decided to risk his safety just so they don't lose their money? 

It seems to me that whether people view these women as "heroes" or "naive" depends only on something outside their control: whether the man really was in danger or whether he lied to them.

So, let's get to answering the question I set out to answer in this post: Could I have been swindled by the Tinder Swindler? 

I'm proud to say that I probably would have. I'd rather destroy my financial future to potentially save someone's life (even at the risk of being conned), rather than let someone die when I could've prevented it.