Simon Leviev: How the Tinder Swindler Keeps Escaping Justice

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Before he was the Tinder Swindler, Shimon Yehuda Hayut was a teenager who stole a checkbook from a family while babysitting and left their five-year-old alone to cash the checks. Born on September 27, 1990, in Bnei Brak, Israel, the son of the chief rabbi of El Al Airlines, he fled those charges on a fake passport through Jordan to Europe. In 2015 Finnish authorities arrested him carrying two forged passports, three forged driver's licenses, and five American Express cards.

After prison in Finland he made his decisive move: he legally changed his name to Simon Leviev and posed as the son of diamond billionaire Lev Leviev. This episode explains how, between 2017 and 2019, he used Tinder, private jets, and staged emergencies to persuade women to take out bank loans on his behalf, each victim funding the courtship of the next. It follows the 2019 exposure, a 15-month sentence cut to five months, the Netflix documentary, and an arrest in Georgia in 2025 that ended with his release.

He sent identical messages to several women at once, with photos of a bleeding bodyguard, claiming enemies in the diamond trade made his own cards unsafe to use.
The scheme allegedly took $10 million, with the women left legally liable for the loans their banks had issued.
Norwegian paper Verdens Gang and journalist Uri Blau exposed him in 2019, and Interpol arrested him in Greece soon after.
On CNN in February 2022 he denied the fraud and said his wealth came from buying Bitcoin in 2011, while the real Leviev family filed complaints against him.
Arrested at Batumi International Airport on September 15, 2025, he was freed on November 14 after German authorities dropped their inquiry for lack of evidence.

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