The “Tinder Swindler” has finally escaped the legal battles stemming from his adventures in online dating, it seems.
Israeli man Shimon Hayut changed his name to Simon Leviev and claimed to be part of a billionaire diamond-trading family, with several women claiming he had used the guise to seduce and con them out of buckets of cash.
In 2022, the real Leviev family sued Simon in their native Israel, claiming he’d used their name to trick the women, as well as various businesses, causing enormous harm to the family’s firms.
The matter was resolved without any determination of guilt.
It’s the last of the legal challenges facing Simon.
He served two and a half years in a Finnish prison after he was found guilty of defrauding the women. He also served 15 months in an Israeli prison after being convicted of four fraud charges, but was released after five months.
TMZ was first to report on the settlement.
The tale was covered in a hit Netflitx documentary, the “Tinder Swindler,” in 2022. It showed how he flaunted a luxurious, jet-setting lifestyle to convince the women he was an ultra-wealthy scion, only to come up with dire emergencies that, he claimed, he needed loans from the women to escape from.
“We have suffered from the ‘Tinder Swindler’ for years,” she said in 2022. “We knew he was defrauding companies and other women who reached out. We tried so hard to make him stop, fought him, and reported him to the police.”
On Friday Leviev framed the settlement as a vindication.
His lawyer, Sharon Nahari, also said extradition proceedings in Germany have been closed and that there are no remaining criminal cases against him in Europe.
He also argued that public opinion turned him into a villain before the facts were fully examined.
“The world likes to find this villain, this bad guy that everybody likes to hate,” he said. “But I’m not this guy. Sorry to disappoint everyone.”
Leviev says the Netflix documentary changed his life, bringing him worldwide fame and new business opportunities.
