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Deception, scams and cases of false identity – these are common risks in online dating that Shimon Hayut says he can prevent with his soon-to-be-released dating app, Safe Love.
He knows how fraudsters commit these deceptions. He was one of them.
Hayut, also known as Simon Leviev, gained notoriety as “the Tinder scammer” due to his romance fraud schemes. The 36-year-old made a considerable income by extorting money from women he met online.
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Shimon Hayut gained notoriety as the “Tinder Swindler” due to his romance fraud schemes. (Shimon Hayout)
In 2015 and 2019, he was convicted of fraud, theft and forgery in Israel and Finland, he confirmed to Fox News Digital in a videoconference interview.
He served his sentence in Finland from September 2015 to March 2017, he said. He was arrested in Israel in 2011 and 2017 for the same case. And in June 2019, he was extradited from Greece to Israel where he was imprisoned until May 2020, he said.
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In Finland, Hayut was sentenced in 2015 to two years in prison after authorities said he defrauded three women, according to the Times of Israel.
He was convicted in 2019 of four counts of fraud and sentenced to 15 months in prison, but was released after five months, the BBC reported.
Hayut now plans to use his expertise to reduce the risks of finding potential partners online, he said.
He compares himself to famous fraudster Frank Abagnale Jr., a convicted con artist immortalized in Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film “Catch Me If You Can.” Abagnale committed fraud, theft, and check forgery, and later became a fraud prevention specialist.
Greek police announced on Tuesday July 2, 2019 the arrest of an Israeli accused of fraud, referred to in the media as the “Tinder scammer” who allegedly defrauded European women he had met on the dating site. The suspect was described in the media as Shimon Hayut. According to Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang, the suspect presented himself as the son of an Israeli multimillionaire and had defrauded women in Norway, Finland and Sweden of hundreds of thousands of dollars to finance a lavish lifestyle. (TORE KRISTIANSEN/AFP via Getty Images)
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“The idea came from the fact that I was the Tinder scammer,” Hayut said in his thick Israeli accent. “They say I made the dating environment unsafe. So I was like, ‘All right. Let’s make it safe.”
He mainly divides his time between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. His expertise in fraud makes him the ideal candidate to help others avoid becoming victims, he said.
“I used fake passports. I used a fake identity,” he said. “I was convicted for this. I paid my debts to society. Obviously, things I’m not proud of.”
But because of his disreputable past, he is confident he has the skills and knowledge to prevent the types of fraud he has committed.
“I know what fake passports look like,” he said. And maybe even “better than a passport controller at the airport, because I managed to smuggle hundreds, if not thousands, of… fake passports.”
“No one ever questioned me once,” he said.
“I know I know how to challenge the system.”
“They say I made the dating environment unsafe. So I thought, ‘All right. Let’s make it safe,'” Shimon Hayut said. (Shimon Hayout)
The match went bad
Hayut’s new dating platform will have stricter identification requirements than existing dating apps, he said.
To ensure the authenticity of a user’s online identity, they will need to download a government ID card and take a corresponding selfie. Any photo uploaded to a profile will not be allowed if it differs by more than 15% from that selfie, he said.
He wants to ensure that potential matches viewed online are the same – in appearance and identity – as those who show up for a date.
He got the idea from his own match gone wrong involving a transgender person, he said.
A planned safety feature for the Safe Love app is an SOS button that users can press if they feel unsafe on a date.
The phone would immediately start recording audio and video. It would share the user’s location. And this would be shared with law enforcement authorities, Hayut said.
Safe Love is in the final stages of the regulatory phase that it must go through before its release.
“It could be a few days, a few weeks, but hopefully sooner rather than later,” he said.
Shimon Hayut plans to launch the Safe Love app soon. (Shimon Hayout)
Giving love a bad name or love crimes
The Online Dating and Discovery Association (ODDA), a group that promotes safe online dating, has spoken out against Hayut’s plan for the app.
In a letter sent to Google and Apple, the organization urged the tech giants to ban the platform from their app stores.
“We do not believe that either app store wants to be the platform that will welcome a fraudster’s return to the very environment in which their crimes were committed,” ODDA wrote in the letter.
“Allowing a convicted romance fraud offender to operate a dating platform, an environment built entirely on trust and the emotional and financial vulnerabilities he has already proven to exploit, completely undermines the efforts made by our industry and poses a very real risk to users.”
But this reaction does not threaten to stop his project, Hayut said.
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“They won’t make it and they won’t make it,” he said.
They are afraid of the superiority of his product, he says.
“I mean, they’re threatened by me.”
Fox News Digital has contacted Apple and Google for comment.
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Hayut said his experience drives him to make sure his app “works perfectly” before release. He can’t afford to make mistakes, he said.
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“If something goes wrong, I can’t say, ‘Ah, we have a flaw in our system.’ Automatically, I will be (considered) guilty of the charges against me.”
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“I have a reputation. That means I can’t make mistakes.”
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He knows that some say his past crimes make him a threat. He wants them to think about this:
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“Yes, on paper I am a convicted felon,” he said. “But I’m not the same kid I was at 19.”
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Although he has never been married, he is now the father of an 11-year-old daughter with one woman and a 3-year-old son with another woman.
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“And we change. People change.”
Gn tech
