What is Simon Leviev, Netflix’s Tinder Swindler, doing now? He posed as a billionaire’s son, conned dozens of women out of thousands and has since deleted his Instagram
- Between 2017 and 2019, Israeli national Simon Leviev – born Shimon Hayut – conned women he met through the dating app out of almost US$10 million in total
- He was arrested in 2017 but only spent five months in prison due to good behaviour; since then, he’s supposedly gotten into business consulting, real estate and bitcoin
Tinder has long been a go-to dating app for those looking for love, but it became the starting point of a complete nightmare when several European women encountered a fraudster who they thought was their prince charming. Now known worldwide as Simon Leviev, the Tinder Swindler, Israeli national Shimon Hayut was the subject of the recent Netflix documentary with the same name.
But who is the real Shimon Hayut and what other crimes has he committed aside from defrauding unsuspecting women out of hundreds of thousands of dollars?
Hayut changed his name to Simon Leviev to falsely pose as the son of Russian-Israeli billionaire and diamond mogul, Lev Leviev. Through a lavish lifestyle depicted on social media, he would scam European women he met on Tinder and lure them with destination dates via private jets, expensive meals and five-star hotels.
After building his persona and his relationships with his dates, he would then feign danger from “enemies” who he said sought to hurt him, and use that situation to scam his girlfriends into lending him thousands of dollars and letting him use their credit cards.
Through this Ponzi scheme between 2017 and 2019, where he would use money from one woman to fund lavish dates with another, Hayut’s fraudulent activities were said to have amounted to an estimated US$10 million, according to The Times of Israel. And the documentary was just the tip of the iceberg of Hayut’s many other criminal acts.
Now 31 years old, Hayut’s origins can be traced back to the city of Bnei Brak outside Tel Aviv, Israel. According to The Times of Israel, his father is Rabbi Yohanan Hayut, the chief rabbi of El Al Airlines. His father had also been accused of aiding him in defrauding plaintiff Rabbi Pinhas Badush out of hundreds of thousands of shekels amounting to US$400,000.
In 2011, Hayut was charged in his home country for crimes of theft, forgery, fraud and cashing stolen checks. A year before, he allegedly stole chequebooks from a family he was babysitting for, attempting to forge three checks, and from another household while working as a handyman. He was found out, arrested and released on bail for US$3,000 (10,000 shekels). Later that year, he fled Israel under a fake identity: Mordechai Nissim Tapiro.
The Times of Israel also reported that while living in Finland in 2015, Leviev was charged with defrauding three women and sent to prison from 2015 to 2017. Authorities were to turn him over and return him to Israel before he evaded these charges and fled the country under a new identity. This was also around the time his Tinder scheme took place.