Tinder Swindler Banned from Dating Apps
Contributed by: kellyseal on Monday, February 28 2022 @ 07:20 am
Last modified on Monday, February 28 2022 @ 07:30 am
The infamous “Tinder Swindler” has been banned from several dating apps. Match Group, which owns several popular dating apps including Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid and PlentyofFish, announced that he was no longer welcome on their platforms.
According to Match Group, Shimon Hayut (who also went by Simon Leviev) violated their terms of service, which includes impersonation and asking for money. He created fake profiles on the app using other names in order to keep his con going, according to The Washington Post[*1] .
Match Group also said that ahead of the documentary’s release, the company published new guidelines for users to better protect from scammers and exploitation on its apps.
Hayut was recently profiled in a Netflix documentary about what he’d done – specifically the way he lured women romantically by showing off his lavish lifestyle of limos and private jets and expensive hotels, only to later ask them for money. He called himself the “Prince of Diamonds” and claimed to be the billionaire son of a Russian-Israeli tycoon whose life was in danger because of his “enemies,” and coerced his victims to take out credit cards and increase their spending limits to loan him cash he never repaid, according to The Washington Post.
In the end, he took tens of thousands of dollars from each victim before ghosting them altogether and moving on to the next. The documentary showed how he used money from one woman to pay for his seduction of the next. In total, he took more than ten million dollars.
He was arrested in 2019 and deported to Israel, where he served only five months in jail before being released.
“We have conducted internal investigations and can confirm Simon Leviev is no longer active on Tinder under any of his known aliases,” Tinder said in a statement.
According to the documentary, Hayut had a long history of defrauding people across multiple countries, including in the U.S., Finland and Israel. In 2015, he served two years in prison in Finland for defrauding three women before the authorities turned him back over to Israel to face charges, but he fled again, and that’s where the Netflix documentary picks up.
After the documentary premiered, Hayut posted on Instagram that he would be sharing “his version of events” with people soon, but the post and his account have since been deleted. The three victims featured in the documentary are still paying off their debt, and one even worked with authorities, including Interpol, on capturing him in Greece where he was turned over to authorities.
Match Group asks users to be weary of “over-the-top displays of affection” and “above all else, do not send money online.”