The Tinder Swindler

Felicity Morris's The Tinder Swindler launched on Netflix in February 2022 and was, within its first week, the highest-ranked documentary feature in the streamer's history to that date, number one in over thirty countries on launch weekend. The film is a Raw production for Netflix from the team behind Don't F**k With Cats (2019), with Bernadette Higgins producing alongside Morris. The case at its centre had been broken by the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang in February 2019 in a long-form investigation by reporters Erlend Ofte Arntsen, Natalie Remøe Hansen and Kristoffer Kumar, who appear on camera throughout.

Structurally the film is built almost entirely around three first-person testimonies (those of Cecilie Fjellhøy (London), Pernilla Sjöholm (Stockholm) and Ayleen Charlotte (Amsterdam)) intercut with the original VG reporting and a substantial archive of WhatsApp messages, voice notes, video calls and bank statements supplied by the three women. There is no narrator and no on-screen interviews with the man at the centre of the case; the film instead reproduces his Instagram and dating-app material as the women experienced it.

Critical response was strong but pointed (The Guardian, Time and Vulture singled out Morris's careful work with the witnesses) and the film prompted a tangible policy response from Match Group on cross-app account verification. The case continues to generate follow-up reporting; a long-mooted scripted Netflix adaptation, with Shonda Rhimes attached as producer, has been in development since 2023.