Two victims of Israeli con man Shimon Hayut, aka the “Tinder Swindler,” expressed relief on Tuesday upon hearing the news of his arrest in Georgia a day earlier.
“I celebrated a bit yesterday. I’m allowed to feel happy because this guy destroyed my life,” Pernilla Sjoholm told AFP in an interview in Stockholm.
They had met through the Tinder app in 2018, and she handed over more than $65,000 to him within a few months of their acquaintance. He never paid it back, she said.
Hayut, who had his name legally changed to “Shimon Leviev” so that he could pose as the son of wealthy diamond mogul Lev Avnerovich Leviev, became notorious in the wake of the Netflix documentary “The Tinder Swindler,” which exposed his pattern of fraud and financial crime.
He established companies under numerous aliases to commit “computer and crypto fraud, tax evasion and money laundering totaling millions of euros,” Ynet reported in 2022.
Hayut, 34, was detained on Sep. 15 at Batumi airport “at Interpol’s request,” Georgian officials said, per AFP.
“I was shocked because it’s been such a long time,” one of Hayut’s victims, Norwegian Cecilie Fjellhoy, told AFP. She said she was “super relieved” by his arrest.
Fjellhoy added that its gave her a “sense of calm because I know that I am being protected. I know future victims are being protected, but as well, you’re angry on that it had to take this amount of time and the amount of victims that we know have been accumulated.”
In December 2019, he was sentenced in Israel to 15 months in jail for theft, fraud and forgery, but only served five months before being released.
Hayut is estimated to have obtained some $10 million by defrauding victims across Europe.
