Naman Shrestha
After becoming a victim of a notorious romance scammer named Simon Leviev, Cecilie Fjellhøy teams up with a private investigator named Brianne Joseph to help out multiple victims of romance fraud across the country in Netflix’s ‘Love Con Revenge.’ The focus of the true crime documentary series is Cecilie getting to the bottom of several potential cases of scams, with the invaluable help of Brianne. However, several years ago, Simon, notoriously known as the Tinder Swindler, swindled thousands of dollars from women by making up believable excuses, turning their lives upside down by leaving them with huge debts in the end.
Simon Leviev Was Convicted of Fraud After Scamming Women
Born as Shimon Yehuda Hayut on September 27, 1990, in Ramat Elchanan, Israel, Simon Leviev was reportedly in a wealthy household as his father, Yohanan Hayut, was the chief rabbi of El Al airlines. When he was 15, Simon shifted to New York City with his family’s friends. Ever since his teenage years, he had allegedly been getting involved in petty crimes, such as cheque fraud. Sometime later in life, he legally changed his name from Shimon Hayut to Simon Leviev. Before he started his swindling ways on Tinder, he got into trouble with law enforcement in the early 2010s for stealing checkbooks while working as a babysitter and a handyman, and cashing those checks.
When he was charged with theft, forgery, and fraud in 2011, he fled to Europe using a fake passport. A few years later, he was finally arrested in Finland in 2015 and sentenced to three years in prison. He was transferred to Israel to be recharged and sentenced in 2017, but he ended up escaping the country yet again. Assuming multiple identities while traveling across Europe, Simon met and simultaneously scammed women on the dating app Tinder, including Cecilie Fjellhøy, claiming to be the son of Russian-Israeli diamond mogul Lev Leviev.
After gaining their trust, he asked them to loan him some money, claiming that he was being targeted by a group of his enemies. By 2019, Simon had reportedly scammed women and banks out of hundreds of dollars. It was one of his long-term girlfriends, Ayleen Koeleman, who provided the information about his whereabouts to the police, after which he was taken into custody in Greece in 2019. A few months later, he received a 15-month imprisonment sentence in Israel for his fraudulent crimes.
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Simon Leviev is Reportedly a Published Author Today
In 2020, just five months into his sentence, Simon Leviev was released from prison due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. In light of his crimes, he was also permanently banned from Tinder. After his release, he reportedly provided business advice online for a fee. In 2020, it was reported that he allegedly posed as a medical worker to convince vaccination centre workers to get access to the COVID-19 vaccines before others. While the vaccination center released a statement affirming the same, Simon vehemently denied the accusations. Talking about it, he told The Times of Israel, “I am not someone who waits and no one can say a word about it… I am a businessman. I have money. I can buy anyone or anything that I want.” Addressing whether he paid to get the vaccine, he exclaimed, “Let’s say yes. I had an appointment (to be vaccinated), perhaps there was a bug in the computer. This is a third world country, after all.”
In early 2022, during an interview with Business Insider, he said, “I’m not this monster. I was just a single guy that wanted to meet some girls on Tinder…(These women) weren’t conned and they weren’t threatened…I want to clear my name, I want to say to the world, this is not true.” Claiming that he did not pose as a member of the Leviev family, Simon added, “I’m not a fraud and I’m not a fake. People don’t know me, so they cannot judge me.” That same year, in order to pursue a career in the entertainment industry, he signed with Gina Rodriguez, a talent manager at Gitoni Inc. Recently, in February 2025, he launched his own cryptocurrency named TIND. A few months later, he published his biography titled ‘I am Simon Leviev.’ While it appears that he is on Instagram, but considering his past, has chosen to keep it private.
