Stream It Or Skip It?

Love Con Revenge is a docuseries that shows Cecilie Fjellhøy, one of the victims of the “Tinder Swindler” that was portrayed in the Netflix documentary about the case, helps other victims of romance fraud. She partners with Brianne Joseph, a private investigator who has looked into romance scams in the past. Their goal is to get enough information on the scammer so they can go to law enforcement with some confidence that they’ll take action against the perpetrator.

Opening Shot: Cecilie Fjellhøy sits down for an interview and we hear her say, “I never thought I’d be a victim of romance fraud.”

The Gist: In the first case, the pair go to Nashville to talk to Jill Schardein, who was victimized by a man named Todd Dean, who is later dubbed “The Selfie Scammer”. They met on Facebook Dating, and started going out. He’d carpet-bomb her with selfies and videos saying how much he missed her. Then he started asking for money to fund his mental-health wellness retreat, and the money requests kept coming. At some point, he went radio silent, then appeared again, asking for money once more.

Brianne has an investigator colleague tail Dean, who loves to play poker at local bars, while both Brianne and Cecilie try to find evidence that Dean was taking money from multiple women. His former assistant comes through with bank statements that show some evidence that he took money from the women and transferred them to his personal account. Then the pair go about finding other victims and talking to them, starting with a woman in Idaho named Karen Alpert.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The connection with The Tinder Swindler is obvious, of course, but it also reminds us of series like Catching Killers.

Our Take: There’s quite a bit of reality TV sleight-of-hand in Love Con Revenge, which makes us reluctant to use the term “docuseries” when describing the shows. Phone calls sound staged — and at times, we see either Cecilie or Brianne reacting to what the other is hearing on the phone, despite the fact that speakerphone isn’t being used. There are meetings between Cecilie and Brianne, as well as either woman with a victim or victims that seems less than spontaneous.

It’s distracting, and takes away from the goal of both Cecilie and Brianne, which is to catch these perpetrators in the act of defrauding another victim, so the police have more reason to pay attention to their presentation of the case. There is a lot to be said about how law enforcement tends to think of these romance fraud cases as a civil issue and that they’re complaints from a “scorned” girlfriend. It’s mentioned more than once but not really examined any deeper than that, which can be frustrating.

We do get why this trickery is applied to these shows; there’s a lot of moving parts, multiple locations where Cecilie and Brianne need to be, and then there’s the idea of summarizing what could be a months-long investigation into about an hour’s worth of runtime (the first case doesn’t get concluded until the second episode… more on this in a bit). But it’s done in such a shoddy fashion that all we were doing was identifying the recreated phone calls and conversations instead of hearing about how the women helped bring the perpetrator to account.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Cecilie and Brianne see Todd Dean with a woman who might be another victim and… we then cut to the credits.

Sleeper Star: We give kudos to Jill and the other victims that ask for Cecilie and Brianne’s help for coming forward and talking about getting scammed on camera.

Most Pilot-y Line: Why not make each episode self-contained? The trend of ginning up a phony cliffhanger that compels a viewer to go to the next episode just annoys the living hell out of us.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We like seeing the scammers that are being investigated in Love Con Revenge held responsible for their cons. But the production values of the series really make it hard to pay attention to the cases themselves.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.