'Tinder Swindler', which premiered on February 2, features interviews with multiple women who claim that they are scammed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by Shimon Hayut.
- Feb 8, 2022
AceShowbiz - The man who was investigated in Netflix's documentary "Tinder Swindler" will no longer be able to get his action on the dating app ever again. Tinder has announced that Shimon Hayut has been banned from the app.
"We have conducted internal investigations and can confirm Simon Leviev is no longer active on Tinder under any of his known aliases," Tinder said in a statement to Variety on Friday, February 4. The dating app doubled down on the ban in a statement to E! News on Monday.
"We banned Simon Leviev and any of his known aliases as soon as the story of his actions became public in 2019. He is permanently banned from Tinder," a spokesperson said. "In the lead up to the release of the documentary, we conducted additional internal investigations and can confirm Simon Leviev is not active on Tinder under any of his known aliases."
"Tinder Swindler", which premiered on February 2, featured interviews with multiple women who claimed that they were scammed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by Shimon. He pretended to be the son of Israeli diamond magnate Levi Leviev, the native of Bnei Brak, Israel and lured women in with luxurious first dates.
However, he would later tell his dates that he received threats from so-called enemies in the cut-throat diamond industry. Eventually, he'd say that he feared for his life before asking the women to open a credit card in their name and give it to him because he couldn't use his own card for security purposes. According to Israeli Police and Interpol, Shimon has scammed numerous women out of thousands of dollars.
Israeli newspaper Haaretz stated that Shimon was previously convicted of defrauding three Finnish women and served three years in prison before being released on bail and disappearing in 2017. Meanwhile, Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang went on to investigate Hayut's multiple scams with the help of Fjellhoy, who secretly recorded a conversation with the 31-year-old con man. Shimon, however, denied defrauding her and others, claiming their accusations were born out of a personal vendetta.
Ayleen Koeleman, one of Shimon's longtime girlfriends, caught wind of the report. She tipped off Interpol and Israeli police to his location, which later led to his arrest at the Athens airport on June 28, 2019.
Shimon was sentenced to 15 months in an Israeli prison after he was convicted of four counts of fraud. However, he only served five months, gaining an early release as part of efforts to decrease the prison population at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
