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A convicted con artist who was the focus of the Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler has been arrested in Georgia on Interpol’s request, officials have said.
Shimon Yehuda Hayut, also known as Simon Leviev, was taken into custody on Sunday as he arrived at Batumi international airport in the south-west of the country.
Between 2017 and 2019, Hayut, 34, allegedly used the dating app Tinder to pose as the son of the billionaire diamond mogul Lev Leviev to fleece women of an estimated £7.4m.
The 2022 Netflix documentary claimed that he had created a false online persona to lure victims into emotional and financial entanglements. He sought to match with women on Tinder before taking them out on a glamorous first date, using elaborate and expensive props including bodyguards and private jets, it was claimed.
The documentary suggested that after gaining the women’s trust, he would message them to say his credit card was out of action and ask them to open a new one in their name for him to use.
Hayut denied all the allegations against him. He has said that he was “not a fraud and not a fake” but a “legitimate businessman” who made his fortune through bitcoin.
He was convicted of four charges of fraud, forgery and theft in 2019 after being arrested and extradited to Israel from Greece. He was sentenced to 15 months of prison time, of which he served five due to the Covid pandemic. Hayut was also ordered to pay £35,000 in compensation to the victims and a fine of about £4,600 for having a false passport.
The Georgian interior ministry said Hayut was detained on a red notice from Interpol on Sunday. It is unclear which state requested his arrest.
He was “arrested at Batumi’s airport at Interpol’s request”, the interior ministry spokesperson, Tato Kuchava, told AFP, without giving further details.
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Hayut’s lawyer told Israeli media that the grounds for his arrest were unknown. “I spoke with him this morning after he was detained, but we don’t yet understand the reason,” they said, adding: “He has been travelling freely around the world.”
One of the women who featured on the Netflix documentary, a Norwegian graduate student who was 29 when she dated Hayut, said she gave him more than $270,000 over the course of their relationship. Cecilie Fjellhøy said she was wooed by Hayut after he flew them to Bulgaria from London via a private plane for their first date.
Last November, another victim, Iren Tranov, filed a legal claim against Hayut in Israel for 414,000 shekels (£91,000), claiming she lent him more than 144,000 shekels (£31,000) which he never repaid.
