How a Tinder scammer managed to lure girls out of millions of dollars

Tinder is a fast-growing mobile application used by tens of millions of people around the world for the purpose of dating. Its use is quite simple: at any free moment, a registered user can go to the application and view and mark several options offered to him or her.

Actually, the «swipe» technology consists in swiping the photo you like to the right and vice versa. In this way the system selects pairs, and the user is notified: It’s a match!

Such a match came one day to a 29-year-old tinder user, Cecilia Fellha, and the very next day she personally met a handsome, and no less importantly, very wealthy young man named Simon Leviev.

The relationship developed at lightning speed. That same evening, the personal driver of the Israeli billionaire’s son and «king of diamonds» drove Cecilia to the airport in a luxurious Rolls-Royce. A fairy tale awaited her ahead: a trip with Simon to Sofia, presents, wedding preparations, and a search for a luxury apartment in London to live in together.

But this fairy tale, alas, had a terrible ending.

Simon «got into trouble,» begging his fiancée to help him by taking out a big loan, assuring her that he would more than repay her. In order to increase her credit limit, he made the girl false documents, confirming the fact that she supposedly worked in his company with a salary of 90 thousand dollars.

The result: debts to banks of $250,000 and treatment in a mental hospital!

In time it turned out that Fellhoy was not Leviev’s only victim. While he was «scamming» one, traveling around the world ostensibly on business, the previous victim was paying for his beautiful life with her loans, including luxury hotels, yachts, and travels.

According to some reports, on a similar scam in a very short time, the man managed to lure away about $10 million from the gullible girls. Three of Simon’s victims, including the heroine of our story, decided to tell their stories to the creators of the film «The Tinder Swindler» (Norway).

However, he is no Simon, and certainly not one of the nine children of LLD Diamonds owner Lev Leviev. The 31-year-old con man’s real name is Shimon Hayut, the son of a rabbi from Bnei Brak, Israel.

Since 2011, the guy has been periodically prosecuted for his scams, both in his home country (check forgery) and in other countries. So from 2015 to 2017 he was in a Finnish prison, then tried not to stay anywhere for long, because he was wanted not only in his homeland, but also in Sweden, Denmark, England, Germany and Norway.

In the summer of 2019, after flying to Greece on another fake passport, the fraudster was arrested and extradited to Israel, where he was sentenced to 15 months in an old case of forged checks. He was released early after 5 months for good behavior and as part of a program to prevent an outbreak of coronavirus among prisoners.

Shimon is free again, now a business consultant, living the high life, dating a famous model, while his victims continue to pay his loans.

The only thing Hayut suffered was that the network deleted his tinder account. However, such an inventive scammer, one might say, a genius of his craft, will come up with something else, and worse.

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