Tinder scammer Con Man gets banned from dating app

Tinder has thrown a wrench into Shimon Hayut's plans.

The dating app has officially banned Hayut, who also uses the name Simon Leviev to connect with potential dates, from using the app after the Netflix documentary "The Tinder Swindler" exposed his alleged scams. On Monday, Feb. 5, a Tinder spokesperson told E! News, "We blocked Simon Leviev and all of his known aliases as soon as the story about his actions became public in 2019. He is permanently banned from Tinder. In advance of the documentary's release, we conducted additional internal research and can confirm that Simon Leviev is not active on Tinder under any of his known aliases."

The Netflix documentary, released Feb. 2, features interviews with several women who claim to have been scammed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by Hayut. Pretending to be the son of Israeli diamond magnate Levi Leviev, Hayut, who was born in Bnei Brak, Israel, lured women with luxurious first dates. According to Cecilie Schrøder Fjellhøy, that meant whisking her away to Bulgaria on a private jet.

But as time went on, Hayut told his dates about the threats he faced from so-called enemies in the diamond industry. Eventually, he said he feared for his life and allegedly asked the women to open a credit card in their names and give it to him, since he could not use his own card for security reasons.

Israeli police and Interpol believe he defrauded numerous women out of thousands of dollars.

According to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Hayut was previously convicted of defrauding three Finnish women and served a three-year prison sentence before being released on bail and going into hiding in 2017.

Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang investigated Hayut's multiple frauds with the help of Fjellhøy, who secretly recorded a conversation with the 31-year-old fraudster. In that conversation, Hayut denied having cheated her and others, claiming the allegations arose from a personal vendetta.

However, the VG report was seen by a longtime friend of Hayut's, Ayleen Koeleman, who tipped off Interpol and Israeli police to his whereabouts, leading to his arrest at Athens airport on June 28, 2019.

Hayut was sentenced to 15 months in an Israeli prison for four counts of fraud. However, he served only five months and was released early as part of efforts to reduce the prison population at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

But now he seems to have landed in Tinder prison.