“I was just a bachelor looking to meet girls on Tinder,” says Simon Leviev, real name Shimon Yehuda Hayut, in an interview excerpt. Three women recount in Netflix’s hit documentary, The Tinder Scammerinspired by the investigation of the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang published in 2019, how a certain Simon Leviev, presented as a diamond billionaire, extorted colossal sums from them.
The 31-year-old Israeli who refused to speak in the documentary has agreed to come out of silence to Inside Edition where he operates in duplex from Tel Aviv alongside his partner, the model Kate Konlin. A first trailer of the interview which will be broadcast in two parts on Monday and Tuesday, was unveiled by the American channel. We see the young man, sentenced for having defrauded three Finnish women in 2015, deny the facts. “I am not the Tinder scammer,” he insists in the broadcast extract.
The documentary tells how this man with the false air of Prince Charming extorted hundreds of thousands of dollars from the women he met and seduced through the famous dating app. He developed an ultra-well-crafted Ponzi scheme that allowed him to maintain a princely lifestyle, while letting women believe he loved them. In 2019, he was sentenced to fifteen months in prison in Israel for fraud. He was released after five months. Since the documentary aired in early February, he has been banned from Tinder.