Online dating users face familiar dangers, including deception, scams and fake identities. Shimon Hayut says his upcoming dating app, Safe Love, is designed to help prevent those risks.
He understands how such fraud works because he once carried it out himself.
Hayut, who also used the name Simon Leviev, became known as the “Tinder Swindler” for romance-fraud schemes that brought him substantial sums from women he met online. He is 36.
Shimon Hayut became known as the “Tinder Swindler” because of his romance-fraud schemes. (Shimon Hayut)
Hayut confirmed to News Outlet in a videoconference interview that he was convicted of fraud, theft and forgery in Israel and Finland in 2015 and 2019.
He 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. After being extradited from Greece to Israel in June 2019, he said, he remained jailed until May 2020.
According to the Times of Israel, Finnish authorities sentenced Hayut to two years in prison in 2015 after finding that he had defrauded three women.
In 2019, he was convicted on four fraud charges and received a 15-month sentence. BBC reported that he was released after serving five months.
Hayut now says he plans to draw on that experience to reduce the dangers people face while searching for potential partners online.
He likens his proposed role to that of Frank Abagnale Jr., the convicted con man portrayed in the 2002 Steven Spielberg film “Catch Me If You Can.” Abagnale carried out check fraud, theft and forgery before later working as a fraud-prevention specialist.
Police in Greece said Tuesday, July 2, 2019, that they had arrested an Israeli man accused of fraud. Media reports identified him as the “Tinder Swindler,” alleging that he had defrauded European women he met on the dating site. The suspect was described as Shimon Hayut. Norway’s Verdens Gang newspaper reported that he posed as the son of an Israeli multimillionaire and took hundreds of thousands of dollars from women in Norway, Finland and Sweden to finance a lavish lifestyle. (TORE KRISTIANSEN/AFP via Getty Images)
“The idea came from me being the Tinder Swindler,” Hayut said in his heavy Israeli accent. “They say I made the dating environment unsafe. So I thought, ‘All right. Let’s make it safe.’”
He spends most of his time between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Hayut said his firsthand knowledge of fraud makes him well suited to helping 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, Hayut believes his troubled past gave him the skills and insight needed to identify the types of fraud 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,” he said.
“I know how to challenge the system,” he added.
“They say I made the dating environment unsafe. So I thought, ‘All right. Let’s make it safe,’” Shimon Hayut said. (Shimon Hayut)
Match-gone-wrong
Hayut said Safe Love will impose stricter identity-verification requirements than existing dating apps.
To ensure a user’s online identity is genuine, they will be required to upload a government identification card and take a selfie to match it. Any photos uploaded to a profile will not be allowed if they differ from that selfie by more than 15%, he said.
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He wants to ensure that potential matches viewed online are the same – in appearance and identity – as who shows up on a date.
He got the idea from his own match-gone-wrong involving someone who was transgender, he said.
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, Hayut 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.
Shimon Hayut is planning to launch the Safe Love app soon. (Shimon Hayut)
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 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 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, Hayut 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.”
News Outlet reached out to Apple and Google for comment.
Hayut 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.”
