Deception, scams and fake identities are among the most common dangers in online dating.
Simon Leviev says he can help address those risks through Safe Love, a dating app he plans to release soon.
Leviev says he understands how dating fraud works because he once carried it out himself.
Born Shimon Yehuda Hayut, Leviev became known as the “Tinder Swindler” for romance-fraud schemes in which he extracted money from women he met online. The 36-year-old built a lavish lifestyle through those scams.
He told Fox News Digital in a video conference interview that he was convicted of fraud, theft and forgery in Israel and Finland in 2015 and 2019.
Leviev said he served time in Finland from September 2015 through March 2017. He was also arrested in Israel in 2011 and 2017 in connection with the same case. In June 2019, he was extradited from Greece to Israel, where he remained jailed until May 2020, he said.
In Finland, Leviev received a two-year prison sentence in 2015 after authorities accused him of defrauding three women, according to The Times of Israel.
He was convicted in Israel in 2019 on four fraud charges and sentenced to 15 months in prison. The BBC reported that he was released after serving five months.
Leviev now says he wants to apply his experience with fraud to make online matchmaking safer and reduce the risks people face when searching for a partner.
He compares his planned role to that of Frank Abagnale Jr., the notorious fraudster whose story was portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film “Catch Me If You Can.” Abagnale committed check fraud, theft and forgery before later working as a fraud-prevention specialist.
“The idea came from me being the Tinder Swindler,” Leviev said in his heavy Israeli accent. “They say I made the dating environment unsafe. So I thought, ‘All right. Let’s make it safe.’”
Leviev spends much of his time between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. He said his firsthand knowledge of fraud makes him well suited to help others avoid becoming victims.
“I did use false passports. I did use false identity,” he said. “I’ve been convicted for that. I’ve paid my debts to society. Obviously, things which I’m not proud of.”
Still, Leviev believes his troubled past gave him specific insight into how to stop the types of deception he once committed.
“I know how fake passports look,” he said, adding that he may recognize them “better than a passport controller in the airport, because I did pass hundreds or if not thousands of … fake passports.”
“No one ever questioned me once. I know I know how to challenge the system.”
Match gone wrong
Leviev said Safe Love will impose stricter identity-verification requirements than those used by existing dating applications.
To verify that a user’s online identity is authentic, the app will require a government identification card and a matching selfie. Leviev said profile photos will be rejected if they differ from that selfie by more than 15%.
His goal is to ensure that potential matches look the same online—in both appearance and identity—as they do when they arrive for an in-person date.
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He said the idea was inspired by one of his own failed matches involving a transgender person.
A safety feature planned for the Safe Love app is an SOS button that users can press if they’re feeling unsafe on a date.
The phone would immediately start recording audio and video. It would share the user’s location. And that would be shared with law enforcement authorities, Leviev said.
Safe Love is in the late stages of the regulation phase it must pass before its release.
“It could be a few days, could be a few weeks, but hopefully as soon as possible,” he said.
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 opposing Leviev’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 either app store wishes to be the platform that hosted a fraudster’s return to the very environment in which his 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 on the very emotional and financial vulnerabilities he has already been proven to exploit, completely undermines the efforts our sector has made and represents a very real risk to users.”
But the pushback doesn’t threaten to stop his project, Leviev said.
“They won’t be able to do that, and they won’t succeed,” he said.
They’re afraid of the superiority of his product, he said.
“I mean, they’re threatened by me.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Apple and Google for comment.
Leviev said his background drives him to make sure his app is “working perfectly” before its release. He can’t afford to make any mistakes, he said.
“If something will go wrong, I cannot be saying, ‘Ah, we have a fault in our system.’ Automatically, I will be [considered] guilty as charged.
“I have notoriety. It means that I cannot do mistakes.”
He knows there are some who say his past crimes make him a threat. He wants them to consider this:
“Yes, on paper I’m a convicted criminal,” he said. “But I’m not the same kid that I was [at] 19 years old.”
Though he’s never married, he’s now the father of an 11-year-old daughter with one woman and a 3-year-old son with another woman.
“And we do change. People do change.”
