The world is well and truly in The Tinder Swindler pandemonium right now and for good reason. The new documentary – on top of being utterly shocking – continues to make waves on social media as conman Simon Leviev has reacted to the Netflix special.

Well, Leviev aside, the woman at the heart of the documentary should be the true focus but let’s just take a moment for Ayleen Charlotte in particular.

Although she was only in the one-off Netflix special for the last 20 minutes or so, Ayleen really is the standout hero.

While the documentary focused on the lives of Cecilie Fjellhøy and Pernilla Sjöholm, viewers were none the wiser to the fact that Leviev had a whole other girlfriend in the background. 

Together for 18 months, Ayleen thought she was in a serious relationship, but as she boarded a plane, she came across the viral VG article on Leviev, downloaded it for her flight and woke up to the horrors around her.

Her initial reaction was shock but it quickly turned to thoughts of how to nail Simon. “I knew I was defrauded, I knew that he was fake,” she explains.

“I didn’t want him to get away with this,” she said, and knowing that he was a fugitive – and couldn’t get any women on Tinder anymore because his face was all over Google – she recognised she was in a position of power. It also meant Leviev had nowhere else to turn apart from Ayleen.

“I needed to get my money back but how? I had to come up with a plan,” she says.

She continued to message him that she loved him, called Pernilla and Cecilie “bitches” and asked how he was every day, pretending to be the perfect girlfriend. 

“Maybe you can pawn your car,” Simon suggests. That’s when Ayleen thought of her plan and, in perhaps the best line of the whole documentary, proudly proclaims: “I was going to swindle The Tinder Swindler.”

Covered in designer clothes – Versace, Dolce and Gabbana, Gucci – and working in luxury fashion herself, Ayleen knew how much Simon’s wardrobe would be worth.

Before heading to Prague to retrieve his clothes, Ayleen noticed that Simon had a new American Express card sent to her home under the alias David Sharon.

Simon wasn’t the son of Lev Leviev, he wasn’t the heir to LLD Diamonds and as he started to cry in front of her – after being denied plastic surgery – she recognised him for the “pathetic” person he was. She explains how she looked at him and thought: “If you weren’t such a piece of shit, I would feel sorry for you.” 

Packing up three massive suitcases (which Simon didn’t even help her with), Ayleen couldn’t get out of Prague fast enough.

“Operation sell, sell, sell” was the only thing on Ayleen’s mind and as she continued to tell Simon she hadn’t sold anything, she pocketed the money for herself. “I was never going to send him the money,” she explains.

The most iconic moment of the documentary comes, though, when Ayleen is interrupted by a notification on her phone. “I got an offer on one of Simon’s items,” she smiles. “Speaking of the devil.”

Of course, she’s still selling his things to this day and while it doesn’t match up with the tens of thousands of euros he took from her, it felt like a bit of “payback”, she states.

Simon had reached his limit when he started sending Ayleen 20-minute-long voicenotes and revealing his “several personalities”. They range from loving and caring to threatening and sinister in a matter of moments. 

Such a barrage of explicit messages could get under anyone’s skin and while it was a horrible experience, Ayleen admits: “Part of me was actually enjoying seeing him squirm.” Honestly, while the story is a tragic one, you can’t help but smile at Ayleen being the unashamed voice of reason in the documentary.

Even at his ‘lowest’ point of sleeping in hostels and eating shopping centre leftovers, he still managed to send Ayleen posed selfies and lauded himself as the “homeless king”.

“Cry me a river,” Ayleen laughs.

But Ayleen came into her own – and perhaps, her true crime detective alter ego – once she put all the pieces of the puzzle together to finally nail Simon. 

Sending him a message and only seeing one WhatsApp tick signalled that he was on a flight as he always had his phone on him.

Searching for the next flight from Prague to Athens, Ayleen saw that there was one at the time he went offline. Sending the screenshot to the police, she also tells them about the fake name Simon is likely using.

“I got arrested,” was the first message Simon sent Ayleen after disembarking from the flight and she describes it as “one of the best moments of my life.”

He was arrested by Interpol while using a fake passport, and as soon as she heard, she called Pernilla who went on to notify Cecilie.

“Does he know that you gave that information to the police?” the Netflix producer asks Ayleen.

“No, he never believed that I was capable of doing this – he knows now.”

Then, perhaps the most iconic moment of all comes when Ayleen waves at the camera and smiles: “Hi Simon.”

While The Tinder Swindler may have not ended how we all wanted it to, Ayleen shows us that she’s a woman that will not be silenced, could play Simon at his own game and definitely won’t go down without a fight, which in our eyes makes her the unexpected hero.

The Tinder Swindler is available to stream on Netflix now.  

Image: Netflix