Good Morning, so last night I watched a very interesting documentary/real life event called The Tinder Swindler which has been taking the internet by storm! The story is about a manipulative man called Shimon Hayut, born in Israel in 1988. He manipulatives many women by promising them a life of luxury and wealth. unfortunately, many women fell for his scams and before they knew it they were hundreds of euros in debt. So, how did this happen? how did Shimon Hayut trick many of his victims into a false pretend of wealth and riches? to answer this question, I turned to the psychology behind his scams. SPOILER ALERT: At this point, if you have not already watched the movie, please stop reading now, and return later to this blog. The Tinder Swindler is available on Netflix.
The psychology behind Shimon Hayut's schemes:
- It has been long known by evolutionary psychologist that women favour men with provisional cues and men favour women with high fertility. provisional cues in men are displayed through, wealth, security, status and power. please note, although "good looking men" are attractive in their own way, this trait comes secondary to provisional ability.
- Shimon Hayut left a first-impression on all his victims. One can consider this a sort of "investment". By staging a lifestyle of wealth and riches he fooled his victims into believing that he was an above average male with an enormous amount of power, wealth and most importantly provisional ability. Furthermore, he did not display himself as a one-night-stand kind of guy, but rather a guy who was invested into a long-term commitment. Provisional ability + long-term commitment is a winning recipe in the heart of any female as this from an evolutionary standpoint is the ultimate advantage a female can have for survival and reproduction of ones genes.
- Shimon plays the "fear-trump-card". After his victims are hooked into this idea of a happy ever after lifestyle Shimon twists the story. He plants fear into the minds of his victims and claims their safety is at risk. Fear is one of humans strongest emotions and motivates people to take extreme action they would not otherwise take absent fear. "This is one of the ways that religions controls their followers, but this is a discussion for another day". Coming back to Shimon's schemes, he asks for a small favour. The small favour is he needs a bit of money. The reciprocal psychology of people (I scratch your back, you scratch mine) kicks in. I mean why would you not help your knight in shining armour after he spoiled you rotten for this first few weeks you were together. Besides Shimon is rich and can easily pay you back!
- The plot thickens when Shimon creates fear, panic and urgency! All of a sudden Shimon keeps asking his victims for more urgent larger sums of money in order to "save" the future. At this point there are two psychological phenomena at play. The first is that you already took a loan, so you are already in debt, taking a bit more money won't be so bad. This is a flaw of many humans, and the need to be consistent really plays against us. The effect is termed sunk-cost-fallacy, instead of just letting the whole situation go and moving on from a small loss, more money is invested in a lost cause in hopes of saving it. The second psychological phenomena at play is reduction of cognitive dissonance. Suddenly the victim is faced with conflicting information, how can this billionaire be asking me for money, the story clearly does not add up. In order to save oneself from embarrassment and come to terms with reality, the belief is modified to make oneself feel better about the situation. That is exactly what Shimon's victims did, they started to belief selected information in order to ease there psychological stress. They wanted the lies to be true, they wanted to live this fairy tale life, believing so felt a lot better than admitting that they were conned.
I will leave the discussion here. Please feel free to comment, like and share! I hope this gave you some insight into the how Shimon Hayut used his victims psychology against them and how this recipe for manipulation fooled his victims time and time again!
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