(JTA) — Tinder says it has banned Shimon Hayut and all of his known aliases. But it’s hard to imagine anyone swiping right on the Israeli who masqueraded as a son of the Russian-Israeli diamond dealer Lev Leviev while allegedly defrauding women he met on the dating app, now that millions of people have seen a Netflix documentary about his crimes.
“The Tinder Swindler,” released last week, offers a dramatic reconstruction of the shocking story that emerged in early 2019. Under the alias Simon Leviev, Hayut would wine and dine Scandinavian women, proclaiming his love and commitment before convincing them to give him money that he said he needed to escape his “enemies.”
Hayut had been arrested and jailed in Finland for his crimes, which amounted to a Ponzi scheme as he stole from one woman to support a lavish lifestyle with the next. (Think Clark Rockefeller meets Bernie Madoff meets Anna Delvey.) But after his release, he allegedly carried on in the same way until a handful of victims linked up with each other and Norwegian journalists to reveal his scam.
As a result of their intervention, Hayut — whose father was actually the chief rabbi of El Al, Israel’s national airline — was arrested in Greece and returned to Israel, where he was wanted on years-old fraud charges. He was sentenced to 15 months in prison but served only five before being released early during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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