The popularity of Netflix series The Tinder Swindler has prompted the documentary’s subject to delete his Instagram account.
Netflix’s latest true-crime hit follows a group of women who attempt to track down a dating app user who tricked them out of millions of dollars.
Throughout 2018 and 2019, Shimon Hayut, 31, tricked multiple single women – who he met through the dating app Tinder – into giving him hundreds of thousands of dollars while pretending to be a billionaire named Simon Leviev.
He called himself ‘the prince of diamonds’ and claimed to be the son of billionaire Russian-Israeli diamond mogul, Lev Leviev.
The women Shimon defrauded teamed up to tell their story in The Tinder Swindler on Netflix where they recall their respective relationships with the conman.
Soon after the show premiered, Shimon who is also a convicted conman chose to delete his social media account, which he had been regularly updating with snippets from his high-flying lifestyle, from photos of himself posing on private jets to videos of himself behind the wheel of luxury cars.
The documentary focuses on three of his victims; Cecilie Fjellhoy, Pernilla Sjoholm and Ayleen Charlotte all in different European countries
Over the weekend, Tinder said it had banned the “Tinder Swindler.”
Dating app users reportedly can no longer swipe right on the man who, as detailed by the documentary, wooed multiple women by showering them with lavish goods, flying them by private jet to luxury hotels around the world and professing his love — then demanding they send him money, frequently claiming his life was in grave danger from his “enemies.”
He asked the women to take out American Express credit cards and hounded them to increase their spending limits and loan him cash that he never repaid.
The new documentary, which swiftly soared to the most-watched across the globe zoned in on Shimon’s real-life criminal record and long history of scamming people — mainly women looking for love.
In July 2019, Shimon was arrested in Greece (thanks to, as the documentary shows, a little help from Ayleen Charlotte, Interpol and Israeli police). He was extradited back to Israel.
He was sentenced to 15 months in prison for fraud, and ordered to pay compensation of more than $43,000. But Shimon only served five months, the Times of Israel reported.
Following the documentary’s release, Shimon took to his personal Instagram account, telling his 200,000 followers that he was gearing up to provide his version of events, Variety reported.
However the account — which showed the fraudster posing in swanky suits, clutching champagne bottles and sitting on private jets — has since been deleted.
