Netflix’s documentary series The Tinder Swindler has captured eyes all over the globe and fixed them squarely on the exploits of Shimon Hayut a.k.a. Simon Leviev. The titular scammer, who reportedly took $10 million from women he met on dating apps, recently shared his own account of things in a video interview with Inside Edition, his first public appearance since the show came out.
“I'm not this monster that everybody has created,” he said. “[These women] weren’t conned and they weren’t threatened.”
The series, which debuted in early February, focuses on allegations against Hayut that he courted women on dating apps under false pretences, pretended to be in danger so they would loan him money, and then disappeared from their lives. It has been both a critical success and garnered huge buzz among the TV-watching public. (It may have even been a big win for Tinder’s marketing, depending on what metrics you check.)
In a promotional clip for the interview, Hayut expanded on his comments. “I was just a single guy that wanted to meet some girls on Tinder.” Though only a few quotes from the interview were included in the video segment online, Inside Edition’s writeup contains longer responses from Hayut.
Though he has been convicted of several crimes in the past, chiefly fraud in both Finland and Israel, Hayut is currently free, having served just five months of a 15-month sentence that began in late 2019. He has subsequently been banned from a myriad of dating apps.
In the Inside Edition interview, Hayut made a point of saying, “I am not The Tinder Swindler,” and also stated definitively that he is not the son of diamond industry mogul Lev Leviev, the persona several women claim he used on Tinder. “I never presented myself [as Leviev’s son],” he claimed, despite considerable evidence to the contrary.
In the short clip, his current girlfriend, model Kate Konlin, said she has never loaned him money. (“My God, it’s like, how [can someone] build such a fake story?” she remarked when asked for her thoughts on the allegations.)
“I want to clear my name. I want to say to the world, ‘This is not true,’” Hayut said. He also responded directly to the claim that he is “really a fraud and a fake.”
“I’m not a fraud and I’m not a fake. People don’t know me so they cannot judge me,” he said. “I'm the biggest gentleman in the world.”
And in perhaps the least surprising twist, Hayut turned out to be a crypto bro, and claimed that’s how he has been able to fund his lux lifestyle that includes routine private jet trips and designer garments.
“I’m a legit businessman. I bought bitcoin in 2011 when it was nothing,” he explained. “I don’t need to say how much it’s worth now.”
According to Netflix, Hayut has never been charged or convicted for what he did to Cecilie Fjellhøy, Pernilla Sjöholm and Ayleen Charlotte, the three women featured prominently in The Tinder Swindler. That’s likely because his actions occurred in several different countries, which makes them more difficult to successfully prosecute.
As international criminal law expert Ben Keith told Netflix podcast The Making of a Swindler, although there is a European public prosecutor and police force, Europol, who could help with an investigation, it is more concerned with large-scale people trafficking, drug trafficking and terrorist networks. “[Hayut] is not the sort of individual that they are seeking to prosecute.”.
And with the recent news that he’s joined the video recording app Cameo and signed with a talent manager, it’s highly unlikely we’ve seen the last of Shimon Hayut.
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