Meet Simon Leviev of Tinder Swindler

Simon Leviev  is an Israeli conman, wanted in several parts of Europe for  theft, forgery and fraud. He recently got popular after Netflix made a documentary, titled The Tinder Swindler exposing his fraudulent activities on the dating app.

He was born on 27 September 1990  as Shimon Yehuda Hayut but he changed his name to Simon Leviev, presenting himself as the son Lev Avnerovich Leviev, an Israeli businessman known as “The King of Diamonds” to his victims.

At the age of 15, Simon moved away from Isreal to  the United State with his family’s friends, who later accused him of misusing their credit card. According to reports Leviev has been committing minor cons like cheque fraud since he was a teenager.

He left Israel again in 2011 to avoid going to trial for fraud-related crimes he’d committed in his early 20s and headed to Finland, where he reportedly began scamming women on Tinder, In 2015, he served 2 years in Finnish prison after swindling three women, and upon his 2017 release, he went back to Israel. Before he could be arrested, he escaped again, heading back to Europe.

Simon travelled around Europe, pretending to be different people. He exploited several women in Germany using the name Michael Bilton. He also presented himself as the son of Russian-Israeli diamond mogul Lev Leviev, using the dating app Tinder to contact women as Leviev, and tricked them into loaning him money that he never repaid.

Accordin to the Neflix documentary, Simon would charm women with lavish gifts, taking them to dinners on private jets using money he borrowed from other women he previously conned. He would later pretend he was being targeted by his “enemies”, often sending the same messages and images pretending that his bodyguard was attacked, asking his victims to help him financially; they would often take out bank loans and new credit cards in order to help. He would then use the money gained through the deception to lure new victims, while essentially operating a Ponzi scheme.Later, he would pretend to repay his victims by sending forged documents showing fake bank transfers.

In 2019, he was arrested by Interpol in Greece and extradited to Israel for using a forged passport. Later that year, he was sentenced to 15 months in prison in Israel,  but was released five months later as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. According to The Times of Israel, between 2017 and 2019 he allegedly conned an estimated $10 million from victims across Europe.

Currently 31 years old, Simon Leviev lives as a free man in Israel and is currently dating Israeli model Kate Konlin, according to Instagram stories shown in The Tinder Swindler. Before the documentary premiered, his account was active with nearly 100,000 followers, although it was set to private. But as the work gained popularity, Leviev deactivated his Instagram altogether. Before deleting the account, he wrote: “Thank you for all your support. I will share my side of the story in the next few days when I have sorted out the best and most respectful way to tell it, both to the involved parties and myself. Until then, please keep an open mind and heart.”