Simon Leviev, the Israeli man known worldwide as the “Tinder Swindler” for defrauding women he met on dating apps, says he is launching a new dating platform called Safe Love that he claims will prevent the exact kind of fraud he was convicted of committing.
Leviev, also known as Shimon Hayut, 36, confirmed to Fox News Digital that he was convicted of fraud, theft and forgery in Israel and Finland in 2015 and 2019. He served time in Finland from September 2015 until March 2017, was arrested in Israel in 2011 and 2017, and was extradited from Greece to Israel in June 2019, where he remained jailed until May 2020.
Finnish authorities said Leviev defrauded three women, and a court there sentenced him in 2015 to two years in prison, according to the Times of Israel. He was convicted again in 2019 on four fraud charges and sentenced to 15 months, but was released after five, according to the BBC.
Now Leviev says that history qualifies him to fix the very problem he created. He compared himself to Frank Abagnale Jr., the con man portrayed in “Catch Me If You Can,” who later became a fraud-prevention consultant.
“The idea came from me being the Tinder Swindler,” Leviev said. “They say I made the dating environment unsafe. So I thought, ‘All right. Let’s make it safe.'”
Leviev, who splits his time between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, did not shy away from his record in the interview.
“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.”
He argued that his familiarity with forged documents gives him an edge in building identity-verification tools.
“I know how fake passports look,” he said, adding he may know 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 how to challenge the system.”
What the app would require
Safe Love would require users to upload a government identification card and a selfie. Profile photos would be rejected if they differ from that selfie by more than 15%, according to Leviev. He said the idea stemmed from one of his own online matches involving someone who was transgender.
The app would also include an SOS button. If a user feels unsafe on a date, pressing it would trigger audio and video recording, share the user’s location, and alert law enforcement, Leviev said.
He said the app is in the late stages of the regulatory review it must clear before release. “It could be a few days, could be a few weeks, but hopefully as soon as possible,” he said.
Industry pushback
The Online Dating and Discovery Association, a group that promotes safe online dating, has formally objected to the app and sent a letter urging Apple and Google to keep it off 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,” the ODDA wrote.
“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.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Apple and Google for comment. Leviev dismissed the association’s objections.
“They won’t be able to do that, and they won’t succeed,” he said, adding, “I mean, they’re threatened by me.”
Leviev said his notoriety leaves him no room for error. “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,” he said. “I have notoriety. It means that I cannot do mistakes.”
He has never married but is the father of an 11-year-old daughter with one woman and a 3-year-old son with another. Addressing critics who say his past makes him unfit to run a dating platform, he said: “Yes, on paper I’m a convicted criminal. But I’m not the same kid that I was [at] 19 years old. And we do change. People do change.”
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