'Tinder Swindler' Plans New Dating App to Combat Fraud

Shimon Hayut, the man known as the "Tinder Swindler" and Simon Leviev, has announced plans to launch a new dating app called Safe Love, designed to prevent the romance fraud he once perpetrated. Hayut, who gained notoriety for defrauding women he met on dating apps, stated in a videoconference interview that his app will incorporate advanced security measures, including rigorous identity verification and location sharing with law enforcement.

Hayut, 36, admitted to using false identities and passports in his past schemes, for which he has faced convictions and served time in Israel and Finland. In 2015, he was sentenced to two years in Finland for defrauding three women, and in 2019, he was convicted of four fraud charges in Israel, receiving a 15-month sentence. He asserts that he has "paid his debts to society" and now intends to leverage his intimate knowledge of fraud to protect others.

"The idea came from me being the Tinder Swindler," Hayut told Fox News Digital. "They say I made the dating environment unsafe. So I thought, ‘All right. Let’s make it safe.’" He draws a parallel to convicted fraudster Frank Abagnale Jr., who, after a career in check fraud, became a fraud-prevention specialist.

The Safe Love app aims to ensure users' online identities are genuine. Potential users will be required to upload a government identification card and match it with a selfie. Photos on profiles will be subject to a strict similarity threshold compared to the verification selfie. Hayut also plans to include an SOS button that, when pressed, would immediately begin recording audio and video, and share the user's location with authorities.

Despite Hayut's claims, the Online Dating and Discovery Association (ODDA), an organization promoting safe online dating, has urged Apple and Google to ban the Safe Love app from their respective app stores. In a letter to the tech giants, ODDA stated that allowing a convicted romance fraud offender to operate a dating platform "undermines the efforts our sector has made and represents a very real risk to users."

Hayut dismissed the pushback, expressing confidence in his app's superiority and claiming that ODDA is "threatened by me." He emphasized the critical importance of his app functioning flawlessly due to his public notoriety, stating that any mistake would automatically make him liable. "I have notoriety. It means that I cannot do mistakes," he said.

Hayut, who is now a father to two children, also expressed that he has changed since his younger years. "Yes, on paper I'm a convicted criminal. But I'm not the same kid that I was [at] 19 years old. And we do change. People do change."

Safe Love is reportedly in the final stages of regulatory approval and could be released in the coming weeks. Apple and Google have not yet commented on ODDA's request.