Spanish Court Issues Arrest Warrant For ‘Tinder Swidler’ Documentary Subject Shimon Hayut

Shimon Hayut gained infamy when he was the subject of the Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler, which showed how he persuaded women to send him money by posing with an alias as the son of a diamond mogul on the dating app Tinder. Thanks to his new celebrity, Hayut was hit with an arrest warrant for an old driving infraction in Spain.

The warrant is from an incident back in 2019 when the titular Tinder Swindler reportedly presented a fake ID to police when he was pulled over for driving on the beach. Spanish authorities were close to dropping the case when the Netflix doc premiered in early February. They decided to reach out to the Norwegian journalists who first broke the story of Hayut’s scams in the tabloid Verdens Gang and got what they needed to issue the warrant.

After forming a bond with the women in online chats, he would convince them he was on the run from threatening figures to scam them out of their money. He then used money obtained from a victim to pay for lavish gifts to attract new scam targets, basically operating a Ponzi Scheme operation through a dating app.

In an interview with Inside Edition, Hayut referred to himself as “a legit businessman,” and said, “I’m not this monster that everybody has created.” He also said that he procured his riches not through these scams, but by investing in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin in 2011.

He was convicted of fraud, theft and forgery in late 2019, but was released five months into his 15-month sentence due to the coronavirus pandemic. Along with being wanted in Spain, Hayut is also wanted in several other countries including the United Kingdom, Norway and Sweden. He is also facing a lawsuit from Russian-Israeli diamond tycoon Lev Leviev, whose last name he fraudulently adopted to trick his victims.